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Just what is Outdoor Education?

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John Dewey and Education Outdoors

John Dewey and Education Outdoors

Making Sense of the ‘Educational Situation’
John Dewey and
through more than a Century of Progressive
Reforms
Education Outdoors
John Quay Making Sense of the ‘Educational
The University of Melbourne, Australia

and
Situation’ through more than a
Jayson Seaman
Century of Progressive Reforms
University of New Hampshire, USA

In this book we take the reader on a journey through the various curriculum reforms that John Quay and Jayson Seaman
have emerged in the USA around the idea of conducting education outdoors – through
initiatives such as nature-study, camping education, adventure education, environmental
education, experiential education and place based education. This is a historical journey with
an underlying message for educators, one we are able to illuminate through the educational
Foreword by Clifford Knapp
theories of John Dewey. Central to this message is a deeper understanding of human
experience as both aesthetic and reflective, leading to a more coherent comprehension of not
just outdoor education, but of education itself.
Whether we knew it or not, all of us interested in the field of education have been waiting for
this book. John Dewey and Education Outdoors is the tool we need to help understand and
explain experiential education in general and outdoor education in particular. This is an expertly
researched and written account of how and why outdoor education has developed, and been such
a vital feature in exemplary educational practices. Because of this work I will no longer have to
stumble through some inadequate explanation of the history and philosophy of outdoor education,
I can now simply point to this book and suggest that everyone read it.
—Dr. Dan Garvey, President Emeritus, Prescott College,
Former President and Executive Director,
Association for Experiential Education.
John Dewey and Education Outdoors is a well-researched book that explores the tenets of
Dewey within the contexts of progressive reforms in education. The authors provide detailed
explanations of Dewey’s thoughts on education while exploring the historical intersections with
outdoor education, camping, and environmental education. While situated within a historical
perspective, this book provides insights relevant for today’s discussions on new educational reform
possibilities, learning focused on the whole child that includes out-of-school time experiences
such as camp, and the development of 21st century skills needed to navigate our global society.
—Dr. Deb Bialeschki, Director of Research, American Camp Association.
John Quay and Jayson Seaman

ISBN 978-94-6209-213-6

SensePublishers DIVS

Spine
6.452
mm
John Dewey and Education Outdoors
John Dewey and Education Outdoors
Making Sense of the ‘Educational Situation’ through more than a
Century of Progressive Reforms

John Quay
The University of Melbourne, Australia

and

Jayson Seaman
University of New Hampshire, USA
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6209-213-6 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-94-6209-214-3 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-215-0 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers,

P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Illustrations ............................................................................................................. vii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. xi

Foreword ................................................................................................................ xiii

1. Why be Concerned with Outdoor Education? ...................................................... 1

2. Just What is Outdoor Education? ......................................................................... 5

A Confused Educational Situation ................................................................... 5
From Out-of-Doors to Environment to Place................................................... 8
Summary ........................................................................................................ 10

3. Outdoor Education and Indoor Education .......................................................... 13

The Emergence of ‘Outdoor Education’ ........................................................ 13
Origins of Outdoor Education in Nature-study .............................................. 15
Progress and Tradition in Nature-study.......................................................... 17
From Nature-study to Nature Lore and Camping .......................................... 22
The Rise of Traditional and Progressive Camping ........................................ 25
Developing Tighter Links between Camping and Schooling ........................ 30
Outdoor Education as Method and Subject-matter ........................................ 34
Being Out-of-doors and the Outdoors ............................................................ 37
Summary ........................................................................................................ 43

4. The Environmental Crisis and a Desire for Adventure ...................................... 45

Outdoor Education and the Natural Environment.......................................... 45
Outdoor Education and Environmental Education ........................................ 47
Adventure Education and Environmental Education ..................................... 48
Outdoor Education as Experiential Education ............................................... 53
A Recent Turn: Outdoor Education as Place-based Education ...................... 56
Summary ........................................................................................................ 58

5. Moving Past the Confusion: What is Education?............................................... 61

A Problem of Education, Not Just Outdoor Education .................................. 61
Understanding Education as Experience........................................................ 62
Experience as Reflective and Aesthetic ......................................................... 65
The Problem and Promise of Learning ‘As Such’ ......................................... 70
Knowing, Doing and Being............................................................................ 77
Summary ........................................................................................................ 81

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS

6. Looking Ahead: Outdoor Education as Occupation........................................... 83

Occupations as Progressive Organization of Education ................................ 83
Occupations and Schooling ............................................................................ 89
The Future of (Outdoor) Education................................................................ 91

References ............................................................................................................... 97

About the Authors ................................................................................................. 103

vi
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover. John Dewey (by Eva Watson-Schutze [public domain] courtesy of

Wikipedia Commons).
Figure 1. John Dewey in 1902 (by Eva Watson-Schutze [public domain]
courtesy of Wikipedia Commons).. ......................................................... 7
Figure 2. The two sides Dewey saw involved in educational conflict,
confusion and compromise. ..................................................................... 8
Figure 3. Wilbur S. Jackman (photo [public domain] courtesy of
Wikipedia Commons). ........................................................................... 19
Figure 4. President Warren Harding with members of the nature-study
class from the John Burroughs School looking at an owl’s
nest in a tree on the lawn of the White House, circa 1921
(photo courtesy of Library of Congress). .............................................. 21
Figure 5. School gardening at Jefferson School, Muskogee,
Oklahoma, 1917 (photo courtesy of Library of Congress).................... 22
Figure 6. Cap’n Bill Vinal on a nature guiding walk with a group of
teachers. Here they are looking at a pitcher plant from a
quaking bog in New Jersey (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp). ......... 23
Figure 7. Cap’n Bill Vinal with campers inspecting the cutaway stump of a tree
probably damaged by lightning (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp). ..... 24
Figure 8. Campers at the gate of YMCA Camp Dudley, the oldest
continuously operating camp in the country, 1916 (photo
courtesy of Camp Dudley YMCA Inc., Westport, New York). ............. 25
Figure 9. Campers involved in an official flag raising ceremony, 1924
(photo courtesy of Camp Namanu, Portland, Oregon). ......................... 26
Figure 10. Girls making lamp shades and weaving baskets in front of the
Craft Hut, 1927 (photo courtesy of Camp Winnataska, Pell City,
Alabama). .............................................................................................. 28
Figure 11. L. B. Sharp (left, in hat) talking with Tom Rillo (right, in hat),
another outdoor education pioneer, circa early 1950s at Sharp’s
National Camp – his leadership training camp for outdoor
education in Pennsylvania (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp). ........... 31
Figure 12. L. B. Sharp tending his fire in his tepee at National Camp in
Pennsylvania (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp)................................. 32

vii
ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 13. L. B. Sharp cooking a ritual evening meal at National Camp:

a ‘buffalo tro.’ A buffalo tro (slang for throw) meant cooking
what was usually a beefsteak by throwing it directly on the coals
(photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp). ...................................................... 33
Figure 14. Paddling together in the wilderness, 1948 (photo courtesy
of Clearwater Camp for Girls, Minocqua, Wisconsin). ......................... 34
Figure 15. L. B. Sharp briefing a group of teachers at National Camp
where they are to live for their period of residency during the
leadership training program (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).......... 35
Figure 16. Camp Lincoln hikers climb Noonmark mountain in the
Adirondacks, 1950s (photo courtesy of North Country Camps,
Keeseville, New York)........................................................................... 36
Figure 17. The differing emphases on method and subject-matter in each of
outdoor education ‘in’ and ‘about,’ with ‘for’ the outdoors being
applicable in different ways to both. Shown in brackets are
alignments with adventure education and environmental education
(to be covered in chapter 4), and the possible occupations associated
with each understanding of ‘for’ (to be discussed further in chapter 6). .. 39
Figure 18. Rey Carlson, Director of Bradford Woods Outdoor Centre at
Indiana University, addressing a group during an outdoor
education class in 1965 (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp)................. 40
Figure 19. Julian Smith (on the left of picture) receiving the first
Taft Campus Outdoor Education award in 1970 from
Don Hammerman, Director of the Lorado Taft Field Campus of
Northern Illinois University (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp). ........ 41
Figure 20. Cliff Knapp, with pencil on ear, teaching elementary
education majors about contours, during an outdoor education
class at Carbondale, Southern Illinois University in 1964
(photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp). ...................................................... 42
Figure 21. Phyllis Ford speaking with Bud Wiener (photo courtesy
of Clifford Knapp). ................................................................................ 48
Figure 22. Kurt Hahn addressing an audience at The Athenian School in
northern California in 1965 (photo courtesy of The Athenian
School archive). ..................................................................................... 50
Figure 23. Students and instructors at Hurricane Island outward Bound School
prepare for a round-the-island overnight hike with homemade
backpacks – another test of their individual initiative and
craftsmanship – at Cross Island in 1967 (photo courtesy
of Jim Garrett). ....................................................................................... 51

viii
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 24. Flanked by his cooking gear – #10 cans, one of which has been
fashioned into a Hibachi stove – a student waves to signal that all is
well during his Solo experience during an Outward Bound course at
Hurricane Island in the 1960s (photo courtesy of Jim Garrett). ............ 52
Figure 25. A portrayal of Dewey’s modes of experience – aesthetic and
reflective – as these align with his notion of occupations, thereby
highlighting the connection between experience and education
(through occupations). ........................................................................... 87

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Collaborating on a book from different sides of the world has not been a simple
undertaking, yet both of us have enjoyed immensely the intellectual stimulation and
the challenge of working through our differing perspectives that have been features
of such a process. The end product fulfils the old cliché of being much more than a
sum of the parts.
We initially planned to get together in a physical sense to do much of the
thinking and discussing necessary for such a project; however, while these plans
did not eventuate we were able to use many of the advancements in communication
technology available to us to forge a successful writing relationship. In Dewey’s day
such an undertaking would perhaps have been much more daunting or at least more
time consuming, but today we feel part of the mainstream of online communication.
A book written in this way requires the support of family, and both of us would
like to warmly acknowledge the understanding of our wives and children who had
to deal with the numerous face-to-face online meetings conducted at odd times –
usually at early hours of the morning or in the evening – in order to overcome the
time differences between our physical locations. These times of the day are busy
family times when children are involved and there was always a lot going on in the
background during our conversations.
We would also like to acknowledge the many, many people whose lives have
been entwined with the histories that we unfold through this book. It was never
our intention to provide an exhaustive account of all the many important twists
and turns that make up such histories, so numerous important persons will not
have been mentioned directly in our specific argument. This argument, supported
by our interpretations of Dewey’s work, is illuminated by particular historical
developments in outdoor education, which necessarily have required some selection.
Other developments may have been just as important, but escaped our gaze.
Finally, we would like to thank those who helped us in our search for the
photographs that adorn the text, particularly Cliff Knapp, who shared photos from
the era of school camping, Jim Garrett, who provided photos from early Outward
Bound days, Arlene Ustin, who sourced archival photos of Kurt Hahn, and Deb
Bialeschki, who facilitated access to early summer camp photos. These images put
faces to some of the names and add insight to some of the initiatives that many of
us have heard mentioned when reading and talking about outdoor education in its
many guises.

xi
 FOREWORD

Be prepared to do some deep and reflective thinking as you read this book. You
are about to probe a topic that is close to my heart. I have spent more than 50 years
teaching people of all ages about the importance of learning outside the four walls
of the classroom and school. Of course, I have taught inside classrooms and schools
too, but my focus has been to investigate the knowledge gained by extending
education into the community and beyond.The authors of this book have done their
homework and written about a field of study labeled ‘outdoor education’ and how
different people, including the philosopher/educator John Dewey, have interpreted
the meaning of that and related terms. They hope to give you a better understanding
of how learning outside classrooms has changed over the years and what may lie
ahead in the future. Fortunately, I have met many of the people quoted in this book,
so I had a nostalgic journey throughout the pages.
You may be thinking that there is nothing new or surprising about this kind of
teaching, and that you’ve known it as an excursion or field trip away from the
school. If you were lucky, your teacher took you outside the classroom in elementary,
middle or high school, and even in college, and when you think back over these
experiences, you may still remember some of what you learned when you left
the classroom. This is because these activities are designed to reinforce concepts,
skills, and values through direct experiences in local contexts and to actively
engage students so that they are motivated to learn and retain what is required in
the curriculum. In order to communicate this way of reforming education to others,
educators decided to describe it by placing the adjective, ‘outdoor’ (meaning outside
the classroom) as a prefix to the word ‘education.’ As time passed, different words
have been used to describe the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of this type of school reform:
nature education, camping education, conservation education, environmental
education, adventure education, experiential education, earth education, bioregional
education, ecological education, place-based education, and more. I have compiled
an ever-expanding list of terms, currently at 78, that have been used to label
these fields of study designed to reform education by expanding the concept of
‘classroom.’
As you will read, schools were not the only institutions to initiate programs of
learning in the local or surrounding areas. Recreational facilities such as parks and
nature centers joined the movement into the outdoors. Scouting, YMCAs, 4-H, and
other service groups and hospital therapeutic programs sometimes took advantage
of special environments to promote their goals. Also, Outward Bound, National
Outdoor Leadership Schools, and wilderness educators started programs of outdoor
adventure using canoes, kayaks, and backpacks. Because diverse groups with various

xiii
FOREWORD

goals and objectives adopted the term, ‘outdoor education’, confusion sometimes
arose about what the term meant.
On October 15, 1859 Henry David Thoreau, a leading spokesperson for nature
education in America, wrote in one of his journals:
We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and
schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe.
To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in
which it is placed is absurd. (Thoreau, 2001, p. 500)
John Dewey, renowned as a leader in the Progressive Education Movement in the
United States and abroad, also promoted the idea of outdoor education in a film
produced by the March of Time in 1937. The film, Youth in Camps: Life’s Summer
Camps, showed how L. B. Sharp wanted to reform camping education. Dewey (as
cited in Sharp & Osborne, 1940, p. 236) said:
The average American child seldom comes in direct contact with nature.
In school he learns a few dates from books, to press a button, to step on an
accelerator; but he is in danger of losing contact with primitive realities – with
the world, with the space about us, with fields, with rivers, with the problems
of getting shelter and of obtaining food that have always conditioned life and
that still do.
He also wrote:
The teacher should become intimately acquainted with the conditions of the
local community, physical, historical, economic, occupational, etc., in order to
utilize them as educational resources. (Dewey, 1938, p. 40)
The fact that early educators taught lessons mostly confined to inside classrooms,
prompted a growing interest in opening the school door and going outside to learn
some of the required subject matter when it made pedagogical sense. Thoreau’s and
Dewey’s directives were not always followed in the ensuing years and therefore
outdoor education, in its varied forms, was introduced into the curriculum under
different labels. The criticism that many educators today limit their teaching
to the indoor classroom prompts repeated attempts at school reform. Some
contemporary educators believe that youth are alienated and separated from many
essential outdoor experiences and that they need outdoor education more today
than ever.
Perhaps the time will soon arrive when educators will drop the many prefixes,
(such as outdoor, environmental, nature, adventure, and experiential), to describe
the type of education they think is important for youth. Maybe the only prefixes that
will be used will be ‘good’ or ‘effective’ and we can close the book on confusing
meanings of other educational terms. I wonder if I’m too much of a dreamer and
idealist to ever see that come about? Now you are ready to delve into the story of

xiv
 FOREWORD

how John Dewey and other educators influenced the idea of learning in the broader
classroom known as the community and surrounding open spaces.

Clifford E. Knapp, Professor Emeritus

Department of Teaching and Learning, Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Illinois, U. S. A.

xv
 CHAPTER 1

WHY BE CONCERNED WITH OUTDOOR

EDUCATION?

Although garnering attention most recently due to the identification of “nature deficit
disorder” in the early 21st century (Louv, 2008; see also Cooper, 2005), concern for
children’s contact with nature has actually influenced education for many years.
In response to these concerns, various forms of so-called ‘outdoor education’ have
appeared throughout the 20th century. Looking back, one can now see that outdoor
education functions like other reform monikers – as a seemingly simple label that
actually carries a range of meanings, and is often mobilized by different reformers
to achieve different purposes. Some may view unpacking these meanings as a mere
semantic exercise, but, in the world of educational reform, labels and their meanings
are more than that: in practice they represent a range of educational values and
priorities that sometimes overlap but can also contradict one another. Practitioners
and scholars alike should therefore be alert to seemingly consensual terms that mask
cultural conflicts and historical changes, as outdoor education has done for over
a century now. We believe that scrutinizing how the term outdoor education has
operated over time is more than an exercise in semantics; it can help uncover some
of the deepest and most longstanding problems with education itself.
On its face, the term outdoor education doesn’t sound any alarms – what could be
more natural than children learning in the outdoors? As we will show, however, fierce
controversies have arisen over the term – including the significance of hyphens as
with the term nature-study! The first decade of the 21st century has seen a resurgence
in calls for more contact with the outdoors both in and out of schools, some even
reaching crisis proportions (Mueller, 2009). But these calls echo prior movements
and can benefit from a critical look at what the term outdoor education has meant
throughout the past century.
Given the variations in meaning over time, such a look will require attending to
what John Dewey (1931, p. 1) called “educational confusion.” Outdoor education
has a history as long as institutionalized schooling itself and it therefore provides
a compelling case study of how reform movements typically follow cycles as they
introduce exciting new practices but ultimately tend to succumb to the forces they
were meant to overthrow. To be clear, we are not suggesting that reformers themselves
were confused in the sense of being disoriented and vague about what they were
trying to accomplish. Indeed, as we will show, like Dewey’s contemporaries they
often argued very forcefully and precisely about what outdoor education ought to
involve.

1
CHAPTER 1

If we do not intend confusion to mean the mental state of specific reformers and
their allies, how do we mean it? We use it throughout the book as Dewey himself
did: as a way to characterize the contradictions and paradoxes that recur within the
seemingly never-ending debates about proper educational priorities and approaches –
including the desire to get children outdoors more regularly. A main issue that
preoccupied Dewey over many years, and the one we take up in this book, is the
persistent dichotomy between method and subject matter, or as Dewey famously
put it, child and curriculum. So, while specific outdoor education reformers were
often very clear about their own meanings and the programs they wanted to see
implemented, one can see in retrospect that the larger debates in which they were
embroiled bear the tell-tale marks of this dichotomy. Through a Deweyan lens, one
can read these recurring debates as an indication of a more pervasive confusion about
what education fundamentally is. As Dewey wrote in 1900, already the tendency
was to emphasize technical details and lose sight of the broader societal function of
education – to miss the forest because one is focusing on the trees, so to speak:
Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new movement in education,
it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social view. Otherwise,
changes in the school institution and tradition will be looked at as the arbitrary
inventions of particular teachers; at the worst transitory fads, and at the best
merely improvements in certain details. (Dewey, 1900, p. 20)
Although it was not his intent, we believe Dewey does a fair job here of forecasting the
next century of outdoor education reforms (among many others – see Kliebard, 2004
for an excellent overview of the history of school reform). Rather than fundamentally
changing education, reforms can get caught in dichotomous ways of thinking that wind
up reproducing the dominant structures of institutionalized schooling that marginalize
important initiatives like outdoor education. In other words, because the larger
educational conversation is itself confused, reforms such as outdoor education that
engage on its terms often contain the seeds of their own undoing right from the start.
Although its advocates might like to believe that outdoor education is somehow
special, its history evidences what educational historians David Tyack and Larry
Cuban have called “tinkering toward utopia” (1995) – their name for the process by
which innovative and sweeping reforms become absorbed by schools, improving
conditions for specific children for a time but ultimately changing the overall shape
of the institution ever so slightly if at all. But we do believe outdoor education is
somewhat unique in its history of tinkering and therefore deserves special attention.
Because it has always straddled the boundary between classroom-based and out-of-
school learning, it provides a compelling test case for closely examining and then
moving past the educational confusion that bedevilled Dewey.
On the surface this is a book about outdoor education, an array of compelling
progressive reforms whose history has yet to be satisfactorily written, its pioneers
and trendsetters unrecognized side by side in one volume. Practitioners and scholars
of outdoor education should therefore find this aspect of the book valuable.

2
 WHY BE CONCERNED WITH OUTDOOR EDUCATION?

Beyond that though, the deeper purpose of the book is to provide a framework for
thinking about curriculum theory that does not reproduce the problems inherent in
prevailing ways of thinking – in which the method/subject matter dichotomy usually,
but often subtly, dominates.
To tack back and forth between the specifics of outdoor education and this broader
theoretical concern, we use three devices that we want to make obvious to readers
at the outset: (1) providing a historical narrative of outdoor education in the USA,
in which we profile prominent reformers and the programs/ideas they represented;
(2) tracking explicitly how this history has operated in a series of cycles in which
similar issues and themes arise; and (3) invoking John Dewey throughout and
especially at the end, where we elaborate on his theories where the “social view”
(1900, p. 20) is made central to education. A brief word on each of these will help
orient readers to the rest of the book.
The unfolding story of outdoor education from early beginnings in the 1800s
provides the core of the book which journeys from its initial form in what came to
be called nature-study, to a present which embraces what Clifford Knapp described
in 1997 as “a list of more than 50 terms that fit under the umbrella describing our
field” (p. 4).
When I began my career, we used only a handful of terms: outdoor education,
school camping, conservation education, nature study, nature recreation, and
outdoor recreation, to mention a few. Now we have added many more including:
earth education, ecological education, energy education, expeditionary
learning, environmental and environment education, adventure and challenge
education, outdoor ethics education, bioregional education, science-
technology-society education, global environmental change education, and
sustainable development education. Just look in any professional conference
program for some of these terms and for the variety of activities offered.
(Knapp, 1997, p. 4)
How can one term refer to so many values and programs? Wouldn’t they sometimes
come into conflict with each other, while in other cases echoing one another? The
answer is yes, and these echoes and conflicts provide telling insights into the ways
school reforms reflect broader cultural priorities. But what is also revealing is the
way in which these specific reforms have interacted and supplanted one another
over time, a pattern that is only discernable once one moves beyond the seemingly
homogeneous term ‘outdoor education.’
Our historical narrative will therefore reveal that the process of introducing new
forms of outdoor education has occurred in a cyclical fashion. This is the second
structural feature of the book we want to point out to readers. The cycle we identify
is one of ongoing curricular reform, where anxiety among teachers, itself driven
by children’s dissatisfaction in schools, leads to the introduction of educational
initiatives that could be described as student-centered. This, for instance, is how
nature-study initially developed (in tandem with nostalgic concerns over a declining

3
CHAPTER 1

agricultural economy). The cycle works roughly like this: initiatives like nature-
study become gradually more popular among teachers and students as word spreads
of their seeming ability to capture students’ attention because of their emphasis on
the child. But rather than remaining satisfied with student centeredness, ultimately
some people start to voice concerns about the role of subject matter in these new
initiatives. When this happens, subject matter or curriculum content can become the
focus, gradually shifting the character of the original initiative and rendering it open
to becoming a ‘regular’ school subject. In this vein, nature-study – as one example –
very easily morphed into school science, and then even more specialized subjects
such as botany.
Once the outdoors can be studied indoors in the form of science, children start
to spend more time in classrooms and again become disenchanted with school. This
creates a need for new educational initiatives to fill the void that has been reopened.
Yet another ‘new’ student-centered initiative gradually takes shape, usually with a
new name. As this nascent initiative gains significant traction, it slowly but surely
falls victim to the same forces; the cycle starts again. And the invariable result is
that outdoor programs, rather than being coherently and systematically incorporated
into education, become isolated and jostle for position in an already ‘crowded
curriculum.’ This trend was already being recognized as widespread by reformers
in the late 1800s (e.g., Dewey, 1896; Rice, 1888; Strong, 1889), well before outdoor
education had proliferated in the way Cliff Knapp describes.
When one becomes aware of this cyclical movement, unfolding over extended
periods of time and usually resulting in ‘crowding’ rather than fundamental reform, it
begs the question: ‘Why does this keep happening?’ To try and answer this question
we developed what is the third important structural feature of this book: an analysis
based on the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Here Dewey’s awareness of
educational confusion – and, more importantly, his admittedly complicated attempts
to end it – guide us in presenting a case for understanding why this cycle exists, and
also how we might move beyond it by reimagining the relationships between core
concepts. And although we focus on outdoor education per se, we believe Dewey’s
lessons apply to education more generally.

4
 CHAPTER 2

JUST WHAT IS OUTDOOR EDUCATION?

A CONFUSED EDUCATIONAL SITUATION

In the USA, the specific term outdoor education began to be used as early as the first
decade of the 1900s (Curtis, 1909). At this time outdoor education simply meant a
form of education that wasn’t indoor education. Reformers used the terms out-door,
or out-of-doors: hyphenated terms communicating a sense of being active in settings
other than classrooms. To be involved in out-door education one had to exit a literal
door into the school yard, the school garden, the community past the school fence,
and perhaps even the woods beyond.
The juxtaposition between education conducted in-doors and out-doors, indoor
education and outdoor education, defined outdoor education early on, and it made
sense – if one accepted the idea that the two distinct forms of education could, or
should, be marked off from one another. School-based education was primarily
conducted indoors, the literal door also marking a figurative boundary between two
different worlds, one more real to young people because it connected directly with
life beyond school, the other connected to their lives only remotely.
This was the educational situation that Dewey encountered at the turn of the 20th
century, where ‘outdoor education’ for many children still involved learning through
firsthand work in agricultural trades (see 1902a), and as reformers tried to implement
programs that leveraged these familiar practices. He observed and wrote about this in
his small text titled The Educational Situation. Such a distinction, then characterized by
indoor and outdoor education, indicated to Dewey a broader and more deeply conflicted
and confused educational situation. But rather than seeing the conflicts between these two
forms of education as indicative of two truly different ‘educations’ – as his contemporaries
argued – he described their interplay as a historical condition of the “the wave by which
a new study is introduced into the curriculum” (p. 14). This was a time when school
was overtaking traditional community activities as the main site for children’s learning
on a mass scale, and when new initiatives, some of which would eventually be labelled
outdoor education, were entering schools as part of an enthusiastic wave of reforms:
Someone feels that the school system of his1 town is falling behind the times.
There are rumors of great progress in education making elsewhere. Something
new and important has been introduced; education is being revolutionized by
it; the school superintendent, or members of the board of education, become
somewhat uneasy; the matter is taken up by individuals and clubs; pressure is
brought to bear on the managers of the school system; letters are written to the
newspapers; the editor himself is appealed to to use his great power to advance

5
CHAPTER 2

the cause of progress; editorials appear; finally the school board ordains that
on and after a certain date the particular new branch – be it nature study,
industrial drawing, cooking, manual training, or whatever – shall be taught
in the public schools. The victory is won, and everybody – unless it be some
already overburdened and distracted teacher – congratulates everybody else
that such advanced steps are being taken. (Dewey, 1902a, pp. 14–15)

But this was never the end of the story, for “the next year, or possibly the next
month, there comes an outcry that children do not write or spell or figure as well as
they used to” (Dewey, 1902a, p. 15). And more than this, “that they cannot do the
necessary work in the upper grades, or in the high school, because of the lack of
ready command of the necessary tools of study” (p. 15).

We are told that they are not prepared for business, because their spelling is so
poor, their work in addition and multiplication so slow and inaccurate, their
handwriting so fearfully and wonderfully made. Some zealous soul on the school
board takes up this matter; the newspapers are again heard from; investigations
are set on foot; and the edict goes forth that there must be more drill in the
fundamentals of writing, spelling, and number. (Dewey, 1902a, p. 15)

While Dewey’s simplified tale is more than a century old, his message about
confusion – in which ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ reformers push and pull,
and programs wax and wane – still rings true today. Then, Dewey (1902a, p. 20)
attempted to cut through the confusion by asking a provocative question: “Why
do the newer studies, drawing, music, nature study, manual training; and the older
studies, the three R’s, practically conflict with, instead of reinforcing, one another?”
Dewey deliberately represented the conflict in education as chiefly involving two
sides, calling them “sects” or “schools of opinion” (1902b, p. 4). “One school fixes
its attention upon the importance of the subject matter of the curriculum as compared
with the contents of the child’s own experience” (p. 7). While for “the other sect …
the child is the starting point, the center and the end” (p. 9). Therefore the child’s
development and growth “is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard. To the growth
of the child all studies are subservient; they are instruments valued as the serve the
needs of growth” (p. 9). In shorthand Dewey described this as “the case of the child
vs. the curriculum” (p. 5). Expressed in another way, this is the confusion in education
between method and subject matter, where “method is ultimately reducible to the
question of the order of development of the child’s powers and interests” (1897a,
p. 79); and “curriculum” is the “subject-matter of instruction” (1897b, p. 356). In
Dewey’s analysis, which he elaborated throughout his decades-long career, most of
the educational confusion he observed stemmed from this persistent dualism, which
most reformers neglected to question and therefore tacitly maintained.
Importantly, Dewey did not limit his analysis to schooling; he was, after all, a
philosopher chiefly interested in education as a historical and cultural force and not
as a technical matter of getting children to internalize a greater volume of content,

6
 JUST WHAT IS OUTDOOR EDUCATION?

Figure 1. John Dewey in 1902 (photo by Eva Watson Schutze

[public domain] courtesy of Wikipedia Commons).

or learn it more effectively. He argued that the method/subject matter distinction

could be traced to how people described the most basic aspects of human existence.
He maintained that “reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what
we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing – the how” (1916, p. 196).
And “when we give names to this distinction we have subject matter and method as
our terms” (p. 196). In other words, assuming an actual distinction between subject
matter and method was a philosophical mistake stemming from a misunderstanding
about lived experience and its relation to reflective thinking.
This mistake influenced how most people thought about education and it shaped
reform debates of Dewey’s day. Too often, educational reformers based their
conceptions and thus their initiatives on this mistake and not the basic existential
condition within experience – that subject matter and method are unified, or, in
Dewey’s language, they are “continuous” (1916a, p. 196; see also 1938). Throughout
his career Dewey was vexed by this mistake, which he referred to as a false conflict
between new and old, progress and tradition, method and subject matter, how and
what, and child and curriculum. Figure two illustrates the usual way of conceiving
of ‘sides’ of this debate as it is played out in education.
This division also points into the heart of how outdoor education has evolved over
the century since Dewey first discussed it, and is evident today in terms such as student-
centered vs. teacher-centered, process vs. content, pedagogy vs. curriculum, constructivist
vs. didactic teaching, and emergent vs. standardized curricula. The persistence of these
debates or even the occasional victory of one side over the other suggest that reformers
have not significantly moved past the confusion Dewey wrote about as early as the
1890s, failing to develop a more holistic and comprehensive understanding of education.
Our central argument in this book is that the persistent conflicts (what we
will henceforth call confusion, as Dewey meant it) created by struggles over this

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CHAPTER 2

progressive education traditional education

newer (modern) older
child curriculum
method subject-matter
process content
student-centered teacher-centered
how what

Figure 2. The two sides Dewey saw involved in educational conflict,

confusion and compromise.

differentiation between method and subject matter, can be seen in the evolution of
outdoor education in the USA, where advocates have vacillated between questions
such as ‘Is it a unique method?’ or ‘Is it a distinctive content area?’ Debates over
these questions have raged for a century. In a Deweyan sense outdoor education
suffers from the same confusion as other reforms; it will likely remain so until
advocates move beyond the dualism Dewey tried so hard to abolish.

FROM OUT-OF-DOORS TO ENVIRONMENT TO PLACE

When outdoor education first emerged as an educational term and movement

in the early 1900s, its contribution was primarily on the child side of Dewey’s
distinction, as a new method that better tapped into children’s natural interests and
enabling traditional areas of subject matter to be encountered in more engaging
ways. Predecessors to this version of outdoor education included nature-study,
school gardens, and agricultural education. Camping also came to be considered
outdoor education, leading to the spread of school camping in the mid-20th century.
But in all of these new offerings the main emphasis remained on method – getting
outside enabled a different way of teaching; this was the point. No major claims
were made about curriculum, thus there was no apparent confusion. The educational
situation of which Dewey wrote had not yet become a significant issue for most
outdoor educators, who were mainly concerned with offering an alternative to staid,
classroom instruction. Thus the distinction was often portrayed as a positive one
by progressive educators who highlighted the problems with indoor education and
schooling in general.
Various questions were, however, raised about the role of subject matter even in
the earliest forms of outdoor education, starting with nature-study. The result was a
continual process of adding new educational offerings that prioritized method, many
of which then made a steady migration to the other side of the equation because
they introduced new possibilities for subject matter – which of course had to find

8
 JUST WHAT IS OUTDOOR EDUCATION?

a place amidst already existing topics. This contributed to the growing problem of
the “crowded curriculum” (Dewey, 1896, p. 9), a problem that most readers will
recognize within schools today.
The first historical details of this spiral-like process are outlined in chapter two,
which runs from the early 1830s with nature-study (although at this time the actual
term nature-study had not yet appeared) to the 1960s. But of course the reform cycle
is observable up to the present. In chapter three we cover the 1960s to the 2000s. It is
at the junction of these two chapters, however, in the 1960s, that confusion about the
meaning of the term outdoor education really begins to compound. Prior to this time,
agreeing upon a definition for outdoor education amongst those involved was not
particularly pressing, although attempts were definitely made. But as more scholarly
articles and books began to appear and as other reforms competed for prized space
in the curriculum, the need to claim a definitive answer to the question ‘What is
outdoor education?’ became more urgent.
The 1960s was therefore something of a watershed decade for outdoor education
as its varieties proliferated. Growing concern for the health of the environment
began to influence public discourse and outdoor education was not immune to these
forces. In fact, outdoor education was seen by many as an ideal educational response
to environmental issues. The heightened focus on the environment brought with it a
subtle but powerful shift in understandings of the term outdoor as applied in outdoor
education. From its beginnings as a new method of education that advocated for
being out-of-doors as opposed to indoors, outdoor education was developing into
an area of education concerned mainly with the environment (primarily the natural
environment), and this concern heightened the focus on subject matter in addition to
the existing emphasis on method.
With the cultural focus on the environment gaining momentum through the 1960s
(leading, for example, to the first Earth Day in 1970), talk turned to conservation
education and environmental education. Outdoor education emerged as a prominent
and possibly overarching label among the array of educational responses to the
environmental crisis. The increasing meaning for the outdoors as environment
raised the possibility that knowledge about the environment could be the main
subject matter for outdoor education, which meant it could finally be recognized
as distinct and legitimate. Some, including Phyllis Ford (1981), argued that this
academic domain should be called outdoor/environmental education. None of this
debate, however, was new; just as nature-study had steadily become botany and
other specialized sciences, outdoor education was becoming a subject area focused
on ecological understandings.
Thus the reform wave Dewey wrote about had an ebb as well as a flow. Yet again,
a new progressive initiative that was introduced as a way to appeal to young people’s
interests became transformed into traditional disciplines as subject matter was distilled
and codified as important knowledge about nature. This pattern is most evident with
nature-study and again with environmental education in the 1960s. But while all
this was occurring, others began to focus again on outdoor education as method.

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CHAPTER 2

Hence we also see in the 1960s a delineation from environmental and conservation
education the new terms experiential education and adventure education, which – as
we will show – were, in Dewey’s terms, chiefly directed toward the child. Thus the
question ‘What is outdoor education?’ became even more confused in the 1960s,
starting yet another cycle and representing, but not reconciling, both sides of the
method/subject matter dichotomy.
Adventure educator Simon Priest (1986) attempted to quell the confusion among
these various areas by positioning outdoor education as an umbrella term (as it had
been originally), but this time proposing two branches: environmental education
and adventure education. These then split into four possible areas of relationship:
ecosystemic (environment), ekistic (people-environment), interpersonal (people-
people), intrapersonal (self). Environmental education, Priest argued, was primarily
concerned with ecosystemic and ekistic relationships; adventure education dealt
more with interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.
Although it was an orderly and useful attempt, Priest’s framework did not end
the confusion. It instead cemented method and subject matter as distinct categories.
Priest’s concept of relation was intended to be the connecting link, but the different
forms of relation were now cast as different forms of education: environmental
education focused more on relations between person and subject matter (i.e.,
knowledge of and attitudes toward nature), and adventure education focused on
interpersonal relations, without specification of any crucial subject matter or
curricular sequence. There appeared to be some hope that environmental education
would more explicitly embrace experiential – i.e., constructivist, learner-centered –
methods, however, because of the necessary commitment to subject matter, the
methods often embraced within environmental education involved field work that
recapitulated existing scientific ideas, such as testing a fact or theory, as would a
science experiment in a classroom or laboratory.
An emerging conceptual and practical way forward beyond this confusion between
method and subject matter in outdoor education has gained popularity since Priest’s
proposal: place-based education. Author David Gruenewald (2005) claims that place-
based education is not simply a method, that it also contains subject matter concerning
the notion of place itself, which should be interpreted broadly. Gruenewald, however,
is also very aware that place-based education has yet to be widely incorporated into
more traditional forms of education, suggesting it is at the start of the method/subject
matter cycle, and could experience the ebb towards institutionalization as subject
matter curriculum. Will it escape the seemingly inevitable confusion? Time will tell,
and the analysis we present throughout this book should provide a useful tool for
making such forecasts and imagining ways forward.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we have argued that outdoor education can be characterized as

‘confused’ in the sense that Dewey used this word, meaning it has vacillated between

10
 JUST WHAT IS OUTDOOR EDUCATION?

the two poles of method and subject matter, occasionally trying to overcome, but
ultimately reproducing this dualism. The persistence of this confusion results in
predictable reform cycles, sometimes starting out as new methods for engaging
children but eventually being asked to specify and serve subject matter goals as
they expand and become institutionalized – a phenomenon which usually distorts
the original methods. This is not the fault of ill-intended or incompetent reformers,
but rather, in our Deweyan view, a dynamic that stems from the pervasiveness of
educational confusion more generally. This further indicates that outdoor education,
no matter how far away from the classroom it gets, is subject to the powerful forces
that shape school reforms – dynamics that Dewey spent his career trying to change.
If this situation has been around for many decades, are reformers simply resigning
themselves to its continuation as they strive to create new forms of outdoor education
in the 21st century? For much of his life Dewey was intent on overcoming this
confusion. He even presented a lecture at Harvard University entitled The Way Out of
Educational Confusion (Dewey, 1931), which, despite its pointed title, unfortunately
did not settle the issue in the broader education landscape. Nonetheless, we believe
that the core of Dewey’s pedagogical argument, which has not seriously been
considered in the outdoor education literature, offers a potential way through the
confusion.
In the remainder of the book, we carry on with Dewey’s project and use outdoor
education as a kind of case example of (a) how persistent educational confusion is
evident in reforms that attempt to overcome it, and (b) a compelling arena where an
alternative and non-dualistic – or if you like, a ‘non-confused’ – pathway forward
can be imagined. In the next two chapters, we provide a more substantial outline of
the history of outdoor education reforms, supporting our assertion that confusion
reigns. In chapter five we propose a way of understanding Dewey’s philosophical
work in light of this problem. Much of this revolves around his concept of experience
(which, significantly, he later redefined to mean culture) and particularly his sense
of “education through occupations” (1916a, p. 361). We outline these concepts in
considerable detail in chapter six after discussing Dewey’s radical philosophical
solution to the recurring method/subject matter problem.

NOTES
1
As was standard practice in the period during which Dewey was writing, the use of the pronoun ‘he’
was accepted as referring to all people. We therefore retain the masculine pronoun in Dewey’s original
text, while in our own we also variously use ‘she.’

11
 CHAPTER 3

OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

THE EMERGENCE OF ‘OUTDOOR EDUCATION’

The term outdoor education appeared in the USA around a century ago, first
emerging in discussions of open-air or out-door schools designed to improve the
health of children suffering tuberculosis and other ailments. Yet this “movement
for out-door education,” as Elnora Whitman Curtis (1909, p. 169) described it, was
seen even then to have broader potential. Expressing her thoughts in the language
of the day, Curtis (p. 169) argued that “the present movement for the establishment
of open-air schools while relating to sickly and backward children, merits serious
consideration of educators, as pointing to possible changes in methods and curricula
likely to be of practical benefit to all school children.” Curtis characterized the
advantages of an out-door education in ways that might be familiar to modern
educators:

The advantages of studying nature at first hand and of substituting live

growing things for museum specimens or book descriptions, and of cultivating
habits of observation, is apparent to every student of elementary education.
The advantage, also, of substituting the natural activities of play and work
for the more artificial physical exercises of the schoolroom is too obvious to
need more than a passing mention. Less obvious but no less important is the
subtle influence of forest and field upon the aesthetic and emotional nature of
children usually ignored in discussions of educational questions. (Curtis, 1909,
p. 188)

This early “outdoor school movement” (Upton, 1914, p. iii) that promoted “outdoor
education” (p. 3) gained momentum. In so doing, it gradually brought together
under one banner a range of educational practices that found common interest in
moving beyond the confines of the classroom. In addition to open-air schools were
the compatible areas of nature-study, school gardens, agricultural education, home
credits (academic credit for work done at home), vacation schools, and others that
stepped outside the classroom door (Zueblin, 1916). All of these would come to be
called ‘outdoor education.’ For example, the monthly bulletin of the School Garden
Association of America, whose first issue appeared in October, 1916, was called
Outdoor Education. Notably prominent on the front cover of the first issue was
a list of the educational endeavors meant to be associated with the term outdoor
education: school gardens, home gardens, elementary agriculture, rural science, and
nature-study.

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CHAPTER 3

The main unifying element in the different forms of so-called outdoor education
was that they were not predominantly classroom-based. This common feature was
evident in Charles Zueblin’s (1916) use of the term “outdoor education” (p. 195)
which he explicitly contrasted with the term “indoor education” (p. 177). Zueblin
employed the outdoor-indoor distinction to structure his descriptions of the
educational advances made in the USA at the time, establishing the superiority of
those that occurred away from schoolhouse and classroom and thus, literally, out-of-
doors. Zueblin characterized indoor education pejoratively as “the Gradgrind type of
school, satirized by Dickens in ‘Hard Times’” (p. 177). While he conceded that indoor
education had been improved by progressive reforms, he maintained it was outdoor
education that moved furthest from the classroom and its associated problems, both
physically and symbolically:
The hermetically sealed schoolhouse with rigid desks, inelastic curriculum,
and impervious teacher is being rapidly supplanted by the open schoolhouse
with movable furnishings and open-minded teacher. Light and air admitted
freely are still not adequate for the freest education. City, as well as country,
children must get into the open. Beginning with nature study in the classroom,
nature has rapidly invited the school outdoors. (Zueblin, 1916, p. 195)
In referring to nature-study, Zueblin was bringing an already-established reform
program in under the larger banner of ‘outdoor education.’ Of the various out-of-
doors educational ventures Zueblin listed, the nature-study movement had already
long offered a response to the problems perceived to exist with indoor, classroom-
based education. Interestingly, even the term ‘nature-study’ was not uncontroversial
within this movement. The term first appeared in 1880, but “the idea preceded the
christening [with the term] by some years” (Comstock, 1915, p. 6). As the nature-
study movement gained educational ground, the need to define the concept arose.
Indicative of the controversy was a distinction grounded in the question: Does it,
or does it not, contain a hyphen? “The group that supported not using the hyphen
supported the position that nature study was primarily the study of nature” (Minton,
1980, p. iv). In contrast, “the opposition group believed that nature-study was
more than the study of nature; it was a pedagogical idea with broad application in
educational reform” (p. iv). As such “they felt that the use of the hyphen set the term
apart and more clearly suggested their position” (p. iv).
The nature-study movement in the USA (readers should note the hyphen)
occurred early in response to a perceived gap in the style of education that dominated
American common schools, schools which were “a common feature of life in
most American communities by 1830” providing “locally controlled, voluntary
elementary schooling” (Kaestle, 1983, p. 62). The perceived gap in common school
education did not primarily involve academic content, however. The emphasis in
this early form of nature-study was children’s interests, a focus at odds with much
of educational practice at the time. In his review of the early development of nature-
study in the USA, Ira Benton Meyers (1910, p. 209) recognized that the “pleasing

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 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

and stimulating influence” of nature-study on children was amongst the main reasons
for its introduction in the schools. This was circa 1830, “the period at which nature-
study began to gain some headway in the common schools” (p. 207).1 Recognizable
even in this early period is debate surrounding the method/subject matter dichotomy;
thus the seeds of confusion that would persist in outdoor education were already
planted in the nature-study movement.

ORIGINS OF OUTDOOR EDUCATION IN NATURE-STUDY

The aim of the common schools during this early period “was to place the child
in possession of the tools for acquiring knowledge and it was held that these tools
were spelling, reading, writing, and arithmetic; along with some incidental training
in behavior, morals, and religion” (Meyers, 1910, p. 207). Even Dewey (1900,
p. 40) acknowledged that this was the period when “command of certain symbols,
affording as they did the only access to learning, were all-important.” According to
John Swett (1900, p. 121), classrooms of this time were structured around the aim of
“memorization of the textbook.” Here “it was the office of the teacher to keep order
and hear recitations”; at the same time “it was the duty of the pupils to memorize the
textbook lessons and recite them without comment, or question” (p. 121). Indoor,
classroom based education was primarily focused on memorizing content and this
was reflected in the educational process.
Meyers (1910, p. 208) viewed Swett’s description of classroom life as a fair
representation of “the school atmosphere when nature-study entered.” It was this
Dickensian character of classroom life that stimulated the introduction of nature-
study, which “did not enter as part of the system but as a thing aside” (p. 208). To
be a part of the system was to emphasize the memorization of content and adhere to
stifling classroom norms. Nature-study stood outside these norms and built instead
on what Meyers described as the well recognized “instinctive interest of children in
natural objects and phenomena,” their “insatiable curiosity” and the “ease, wonder
and delight with which they formed acquaintanceship with each new thing” (p. 208).
All of this legitimated situating nature-study as a thing outside “real education,”
such that “the work was not looked upon as an essential part of school study.” Rather
nature-study “should be looked upon as a matter of recreation” (p. 209).
Today, what was then nature-study would be considered extra-curricular or
co-curricular; it was definitively non-academic. And like today, the addition of
recreational aspects to schooling was not accepted without complaint. Zueblin
(1916, p. 180) noted that “opposition to the so-called ‘fads’ or ‘frills’ – nature-study,
music, drawing, industrial and household arts – has been justified in part by their
being superadded to a fixed system of education.” In this practice of superadding
one could see the tendency for what Dewey (1896, p. 9) called the “crowded
curriculum,” a now-routine problem which was already being discussed in the 1880s
as a complication to the introduction of new subjects (see also Rice, 1888, Strong,
1889).

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CHAPTER 3

But significantly, superadding did not leave these new reforms unaltered. These
‘fads and frills’ were deeply affected by their addition to the system. Dewey observed
these newer curricular offerings being transformed by the need to sequence courses
of study across successive school grades. In doing so, he (1902b, p. 28) believed “the
inevitable tendency is to arrest attention upon those parts of the subject-matter which
lend themselves to external assignment and conjunction.” In other words, the tendency
was to see the importance of these new offerings mainly as a new form of content
knowledge that could be subjected to ordered sequencing and external assessment:

Even music, drawing and manual training are profoundly influenced by this
fact. Their own vital aims and spirit are compromised, or even surrendered,
to the necessities for laying out a course of study in such a manner that one
year’s work may fit externally into that of the next. Thus they part with much
of their own distinctive and characteristic value, and become, to a considerable
extent, simple additions to the number of routine studies carried by children
and teacher. (Dewey, 1902b, pp. 28–29)

Even the early forms of nature-study would be incrementally absorbed within

classroom-based education. From an auspicious origin in sincere concern for
children’s firsthand experience and interest – the raison d’être of the early versions
of nature-study – the method was gradually transformed as it “got into the clutches
of the system” (Meyers, 1910, p. 208). Ironically, a study that “took its initiative in
the common schools because of what it promised in the way of wholesome physical,
mental and religious training,” by stressing “direct contact of children with their
nature environment,” eventually “ended in an attempt to teach an organized fund of
knowledge for its own sake” (p. 212). And while this change did not immediately
effect every school that offered nature-study, over a period of less than two decades
nature-study was gradually subsumed within the system such that it became “wholly
confined to botany” (p. 210), as a subject within indoor, classroom based education.
Dewey (1902b, pp. 28–29) recognized that these studies could then be considered to
“serve no new purpose of their own, but [rather they] add to the burden of the old.”
Thus “it is no wonder that when the burden gets too great there is demand that they
be lopped off as excrescences upon the educational system” (p. 29).
Like Dewey, Meyers observed this spiral-like development proceeding through
a series of stages:

Its stages being: a recognition of the fact that children are instinctively interested
in their nature environment; that their reactions to these interests exert on them
a strong growth influence – physically, mentally, spiritually; the school attempts
to utilize this interest; knowledge is systematized; a textbook is written,
teachers are trained through a textbook, they attempt to teach children by the
same method, contact with nature is lost, spontaneous interests vanish from the
schoolroom, the study becomes a mere matter of memorizing the system, public
protest, exit the study either by neglect or expulsion. (Meyers, 1910, p. 212)

16
 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

Meyers prefaced his identification of these stages by commenting that they were not
unique but were elements of a repeating cycle. “It will be of interest to note as we
go on how frequently it has happened that a study, introduced into the schools for
the purpose of ministering to the normal needs of children, has been turned about
and used as an end instead of a means” (1910, pp. 211–212). Meyers (1911, p. 237)
noticed that these stages had moved through their first cycle by the middle of the
nineteenth century when botany had become a feature of the “higher schools …
because of its disciplinary value.” Meanwhile, “in the elementary schools all
organized attempts to teach natural history practically died out” (p. 237). Nature-
study as a method concerned with captivating children’s interests gave way to nature
as an academic subject. Importantly, as nature-study of the 1830s moved indoors, the
cycle began again. “By the early [eighteen] fifties a new movement was attempted
and a strong plea made for a return to a freer out-of-door study of nature from the
standpoint of the child’s interests” (p. 237).

PROGRESS AND TRADITION IN NATURE-STUDY

Nature-study’s cyclic evolution was not as straightforward the second time around.
Meyers (1911, p. 238) observed that “this second movement for a return to nature
from the standpoint of children’s interests had made but little headway when it was
intercepted.” This ‘interception’ came in the form of “two ideas” (p. 238), one of
which resulted in nature-study being conducted as “object-lessons” for the sake of
improving children’s analytical capacities, the other being the trend towards a general
scientific understanding of nature. Gains made in the first reform wave of nature-
study were not completely erased, but its progress became confounded by the added
complexity of these dual emphases. Although well intended and at least initially
concerned with bringing children into contact with nature beyond the classroom,
both of these ideas eventually moved nature-study away from its connection with
the interests of children and formalised it again as a subject area that could be taught
indoors, using textbooks.
Systematizing nature-study: The expansion of object-lessons. Object-lessons were
initially intended to engage children’s interests, but they succumbed to the pressure
to become more indoor and classroom based. “Object-lesson teaching had proved
that the study of things could become as formal a process in learning as the textbook
when things were not considered from the standpoint of the pupil’s interests”
(Meyers, 1911, pp. 240–241). Dewey also regarded object-lessons as problematic.
“No number of object-lessons,” especially when “got up as object-lessons for the sake
of giving information, can afford even the shadow of a substitute for acquaintance
with the plants and animals of the farm and garden acquired through actual living
amongst them and caring for them” (1900, p. 24). Meyers (1911, p. 240) reported
a similar situation with science, where “pupils analyzed, observed, dissected, not
from any impulse of intense individual interest but because the laboratory manual
so directed.” And yet again, with all of this, “the complaint began again to grow that

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‘science and object-lessons as taught are becoming a grind and destroying children’s
instinctive interests in natural objects and phenomena’” (p. 240).
In less than a century, commentators had already observed two waves of ‘nature-
study’ reforms and would soon witness a third. This one possessed a slightly different
flavour than its predecessors due to an expanded effort to understand the child as a
learner and to make deeper inroads into systemic change. The campaign for interests
of the learner increased the demand upon teachers, who up to this point were
apparently content to emphasize curricular content, to change their understanding of
how education worked and thus the way they taught. In today’s language, they were
to become more learner-centered. The new focus on the pupil or child presented a
difficult challenge for many traditionally oriented teachers. Compounding the strain
on teachers grappling with this change was the hasty way in which nature-study was
introduced into many schools. Dora Mitchell (1923, p. 305) reported the difficulties
faced by teachers as “nature-study was introduced rapidly into state and city courses
of study.” The rapid pace of change magnified the significant challenge of grasping
a new way of understanding education:
Usually where nature-study was required, it was put into the curriculum by
some one in authority and each teacher was notified to teach it. To many this
order came as a distinct surprise. The subject had arisen in favor since they
had their training. They were not imbued with the spirit of the movement
and had vague ideas of its aim. Their own training had been formal, of the
memorization type. The spirit of nature-study required of them new habits
of thought, and their time was already fully occupied with numerous cares.
As a consequence their teaching of nature-study was very perfunctory and
unsatisfactory. (Mitchell, 1923, p. 305)
Dewey recognized the problems with this top-down administrative strategy. “To enact
that at a given date all the grades of a certain city shall have nature study is to invite
confusion and distraction” (1902b, p. 34). The issue for nature-study’s advocates
became how to communicate to practising teachers the nuances required by this
shift in teaching practice, in a bureaucratic context characterized by administrative
mandate. One solution: codify the new philosophy in some kind of teaching manual.
As Meyers (1911, p. 242) pointed out, “up to this period (1891) the thing lacking
to fuse this new work into one great movement was a good textbook or guide for
teachers.” Such a guide should emphasize the importance of an educational process
or method based in the interests of the child in coming to understand the content, and
it would function unlike traditional textbooks (which highlighted certain answers
that would be supported by methods geared towards memorization). According
to Meyers the most notable example of such a methods-oriented guide came in a
publication by Wilbur Jackman (1891), who wrote a teaching manual specifically
directed at teachers in the common schools.
Jackman’s main purpose was to train teachers in a new way of teaching. He did
not intend for his book to be simply a resource of factual information. Rather, he

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hoped that teachers would go so far as to engage with it in their own lives. He
(1891, p. 26) believed that teachers could “never equip themselves for this work
by reading alone,” and he strove to assist teachers by “guiding them in their study
so that they may acquire some of the necessary knowledge by actual work, and not
with the intention of pouring out a mass of so-called facts for them to memorize.”
Nature-Study for the Common Schools was not a textbook but a guide for a teacher’s
own learning in the area of nature-study. Yet this point was missed by teachers who
craved manuals that would provide facts: academic content they considered it their
role to impart. Teachers “tried to do something but in many cases what they did was
far from nature-study. Those that had had training in zoology and botany [simply]
taught these subjects in diluted form” (Patterson, 1921, p. 56).2

Figure 3. Wilbur S. Jackman (photo [public domain] courtesy of Wikipedia Commons).

With laudable intentions, Jackman outlined a detailed process for how teachers
could organize and conduct their nature-study teaching via insightful questioning
based on firsthand observations. It offered a program that explicitly incorporated
disciplines such as zoology, botany, geography and meteorology by focusing on
the various natural cycles and events that occurred from season to season. But
this shift to a focus on educational process and children’s interests was too great
a leap for many teachers. “The time for a book was never so ripe,” Meyers (1911,
pp. 242–243) recalled; “no book ever met so directly the spirit of the movement
which it represented, and yet it proved a sore disappointment to teachers.” Such
disappointment stemmed from the fact that Jackman’s book attempted to convey a
method beyond the comprehension of many teachers, who had grown accustomed to
teaching subject matter in a rote fashion.
Teachers still expected a curriculum consisting of answers, facts to communicate
to pupils whose job it was to acquire them. Consequently, the book “met the
teachers unprepared” (Meyers, 1911, p. 243). “It treated of outlook, of purpose, of

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methods of setting to work with the children, of what was best to do and how to do
it” – essentially all those elements of process that supported the child in coming to
meaningful terms with content – “but alas, it failed to tell the teacher what the results
would be after she had done the work, it failed to give the answer to the questions
asked.” Jackman, himself, acknowledged that “as a mere ‘Question and Answer
Book,’ this book must inevitably fail” (1891, p. 27). Meyers (1911, p. 243) captured
the dominant perspective of teachers at the time by proclaiming that “it made little
difference what the nature of the activity was, or the incentive under which carried
on, it was an answer that was wanted.” Content remained an antecedent collection of
facts, with ‘the teaching process’ simply a matter of transmission.
Understanding nature-study’s evolution. This tension in the late 1800s between
science and nature-study, rooted in the division between subject-matter and method,
was pinpointed by Liberty Hyde Bailey (1903) who analogously distinguished two
types of teacher. “The teacher who thinks first of his subject teaches science; he
who thinks of his pupil teaches nature-study” (p. 42). More forcefully he (p. 5)
proclaimed that “nature-study is not science. It is not knowledge. It is not facts. It
is spirit. It is concerned with the child’s outlook on the world.” Bailey’s opinions
on the teaching of nature-study were carried further by Anna Botsford Comstock, a
colleague at Cornell University.3
Nature-study is not elementary science as so taught, because its point of attack
is not the same; error in this respect has caused many a teacher to abandon
nature-study and many a pupil to hate it. In elementary science the work begins
with the simplest animals and plants and progresses logically though to the
highest forms; at least this is the method pursued in most universities and
schools. The object of the study is to give the pupils an outlook over all the
forms of life and their relation to one another. In nature-study the work begins
with any plant or creature which chances to interest the pupil. It begins with the
robin when it comes back to us in March, promising spring; or it begins with
the maple leaf which flutters to the ground in all the beauty of its autumnal
tints. A course in biological science leads to the comprehension of all kinds of
life upon our globe. Nature-study is for the comprehension of the individual
life of the bird, insect or plant that is nearest at hand. (Comstock, 1911, p. 5)
Comstock (1911, p. 1) believed that, “more than all, nature-study gives the child
a sense of companionship with life out of doors and an abiding love of nature. Let
this latter be the teacher’s criterion for judging his or her work.” But instituting
such a major pedagogical shift through one area of study proved to be a difficult
assignment. While many teacher training schools – what were then called ‘normal’
schools – introduced courses in nature-study in the early twentieth century, these
courses were not a panacea either. In actuality they were generally “brief and
afforded little opportunity for the mastery of the great variety of subjects touched
upon by nature-study” (Mitchell, 1923, p. 312), not to mention the difficulties posed
in trying to help teachers adopt a more child-centered process.

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Figure 4. President Warren Harding with members of the nature-study class from the
John Burroughs School looking at an owl’s nest in a tree on the lawn of the White
House, circa 1921 (photo courtesy of Library of Congress).

In spite of the challenges faced by nature-study’s advocates, the desire for a more
progressive form of education was beginning to gain acceptance in other areas. Dora
Otis Mitchell (1923, p. 313) observed that “for at least two decades the leaders in
nature-study were also the leaders in the progressive thought concerning elementary
schools.” But “within recent years many new ideals in other fields have come into
progressive thought regarding elementary schools. The leadership in this thought has
passed from the promoters of nature-study to others” (p. 314). Mitchell specifically
identified an “emphasis on the practical” (p. 314) as an important outcome of
these broader ideals: “Therefore it is held that in nature-study the child should be
encouraged in his observation of those phenomena which have a practical bearing on
his life” (p. 314). This was positively contrasted with an emphasis on observation as
a purely academic task. As a result a new legitimacy was given to endeavours such
as school gardening. Indeed, “the increased interest in school gardens illustrates this
tendency to the practical” (p. 314 fn).
Amidst this growing diversity, nature-study was part of a wider set of progressive
innovations that legitimized the move of teacher and pupils out-of-doors. As the
School Gardening Association of America (1916) had highlighted, school gardens,
home gardens, elementary agriculture and rural science were amongst a growing
list of practical progressive alternatives which co-existed alongside nature-study
as forms of outdoor education. However, while these various forms of outdoor
education became more established features of school curricula in the USA in
the early decades of the twentieth century, the conflict between the traditional

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Figure 5. School gardening at Jefferson School, Muskogee, Oklahoma, 1917

(photo courtesy of Library of Congress).

emphasis on subject-matter (curriculum) and the more progressive focus on

method (child) continued to percolate, resulting in further cyclical movements
and a tendency to ignore more deep-rooted educational confusion. Those favoring
content pulled nature-study and other forms of outdoor education towards the
refined, disciplinary knowledge of science and its corresponding methods of
classroom instruction, while those who emphasized process were concerned
primarily with the interests and activities of children and strove to teach out-of-
doors, academic subject-matter being important but only secondarily and within
the context of firsthand activity.

FROM NATURE-STUDY TO NATURE LORE AND CAMPING

The difficulties in trying to shift the focus of nature-study away from subject
matter to a child-centered method were taken up in a different way by Cap’n Bill
Vinal, a movement pioneer who favored a more authentic, out-of-doors version
of nature-study than usually undertaken in schools. He distinguished this version
of nature-study by introducing the concept of nature-lore. “Lore is … the sort of
knowledge one gains by experience,” he argued (1974–75, p. 3), identifying nature-
lore more closely with the practicalities of everyday existence. Vinal (1940, p. vii)
believed that “nature lore originated with the pioneer who loved his woodsy home.
Through observation and experience, he built up a body of nature understanding and
knowledge that both guided and enriched his existence.” Therefore, “just as nature-
study is not elementary science, – so too, nature-lore is not nature-study” (Vinal,
1922, p. 113). Vinal maintained that nature-lore achieved what many versions of
school based nature-study could not, mainly because it was less constrained by

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the conventions of indoor education. This view led Vinal to favor camps as a more
appropriate setting for outdoor education. “Schools cannot compete with camps as
locations for the presenting of nature,” wrote Vinal (1936, p. 463).

Figure 6. Cap’n Bill Vinal on a nature guiding walk with a group of teachers.
Here they are looking at a pitcher plant from a quaking bog in
New Jersey (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

In an effort to establish a clearer distinction between nature-lore and nature-

study, Vinal (1922, p. 113) provided “detailed comparisons” so as “to show the
present differences in method and what we may expect as results.” He made these
comparisons in a series of points, quoted in full below:
1. nature-study is mainly aquaria, cages, flower pots, and pictures in the schoolroom, …
nature-lore is mainly swimming, fishing, foraging, and photographing out-of-doors;
2. nature-study is mainly studying living things or about living things … nature-lore
is mainly living with living things;
3. nature-study is mainly an outer urge … it is a teacher made plan … nature-lore is
mainly an inner urge … it is a self-assigned learning and is carried to a purposeful
conclusion by the initiative of the learner;
4. nature-study in the traditional school is individualized … the criticism is of the
method of nature-study … nature-lore in the summer camp and a few schools is
socialized … the summer camp is a small democracy;
5. nature-study is something that is taught … nature-lore is something that is
caught; and
6. nature-study starts and stops with a bell … nature-lore comes at any time. (1922,
pp. 114–116)
In short, Vinal perceived that nature-study had adopted a stronger content focus,
while nature-lore was more oriented towards process and the interests of the child.

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Figure 7. Cap’n Bill Vinal with campers inspecting the cutaway stump of a tree probably
damaged by lightning (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

For Bill Vinal, one crucial element of nature-lore was recreation, or more specifically,
nature recreation. “Nature recreation is one of the greatest contributions that nature-
lore can make to society,” he (1926, p. 14) pronounced. Nature-lore required nature
recreation, a form of recreation that occurred away from the classroom and in the
out-of-doors, a position reminiscent of Meyers (1910, p. 209) characterization of
the early nature-study as “a matter of recreation” in contrast to the “real education”
carried on indoors. Vinal (1926, p. 15) noted that “nature-lore experiences come
through such agencies as the summer camp and scouting organizations,” which were
also primarily recreational. “The fundamental movement of nature recreation to the
out-of-doors had its inception in the summer camp,” he (1940, p. viii) affirmed.
While summer camps and scouting organizations were not schools, Vinal foresaw
the possibility of a stronger interconnection between the two, a time when schools
operated their own camps. Indeed, he (1922, p. 113) argued that the distinction he
made between school based nature-study and camp oriented nature-lore could not
be overcome “until the schools have their camps and their opportunities for forest
recreation.” Vinal was amongst the earliest champions of such integration:
To emancipate children from schoolroom poison, to search for truth in the
sunlight, and to declare independence of textbooks will require rethinking. To
reshape our objectives so that the book will develop the individual instead of
the subject of science, so that no one is “failed” but each has the opportunity
to advance according to his own capabilities would seem drastic to some
pedagogues. And yet for the past fifty years such a liberal policy has been used
in camps. (Vinal, 1936, p. 463)
Organized summer camps for children (not school camps) had been slowly growing
in popularity over the latter half of the nineteenth century in the USA, but it was

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in the early twentieth century that organized camping during summer vacation
began to gain broad appeal. This was also a function of schooling. Ward (1935, p. 7)
suggested that “probably the most distinctive reason why the summer camp should
have originated in America” was the shape of the “American school calendar” with
its extended break over summer. This calendar originated in farm life but became
“fixed in custom” to the extent that “schools continued to close in the summer”
(p. 7). Such a prolonged period of time with no school afforded an opportunity to
better engage children’s interests, with special concern directed toward urban youth.
These concerns coincided with “the pioneer spirit and the vision of bringing back
into our highly civilized and in many respects artificial method of living, those early
values of life which come from living in the great out of doors” (Gibson, 1936,
p. 13). Gibson emphasized what many at the time saw as a fundamental distinction
between the goal of “out-doorness” as exemplary of a “cooperative way of living”
and an opposing “in-doorness tendency” that reformers perceived to pervade the
population in general.

Figure 8. Campers at the gate of YMCA Camp Dudley, the oldest

continuously operating camp in the country, 1916 (photo courtesy
of Camp Dudley YMCA Inc., Westport, New York).

THE RISE OF TRADITIONAL AND PROGRESSIVE CAMPING

As the popularity of organized summer camps grew, camping was itself shown to be
susceptible to the same confusion between tradition and progress that afflicted the
schools. In the camps the conflict revealed itself in the tension between the adult-
designed camp program and the developing child. This tension escalated alongside
the increase in the numbers of children and young people attending camps. Many
camps reacted by simply getting bigger, and their programs became concomitantly
more rigid and inflexible. In a report on the summer vacation activities of school
children that emerged from a subcommittee of the White House Conference on Child

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CHAPTER 3

Health and Protection (1933, p. 40), chaired by William Heard Kilpatrick,4 it was
indicated that “the present tendency among camps is to increase in size. The camp
of a hundred or more children is fast becoming the rule.” The same report concluded
that, in the main, “camp organization is so rigid and regimented, the child’s day so
routinized and scheduled that every moment of the day is provided for” (p. 39).

Figure 9. Campers involved in an official flag raising ceremony, 1924

(photo courtesy of Camp Namanu, Portland, Oregon).

While the burgeoning numbers indicated growth in opportunities for children and
adolescents to access outdoor living, “the very growth in size of camps” had an
institutionalizing effect on camp organization, which “tended toward more formal
methods” (Ward, 1935, p. 40). Camping, which Carlos Ward (p. 39) described as
initially “unfettered by schools, conventions and traditions,” nonetheless was not
immune from the same influences. His (p. 50) investigations revealed that “much of
the same method of control and of stimulation to activity which we find in the grades
and examination system of public schools” was being used in camps.
At the centre of these trends was the implementation of a fairly rigid system of
“artificial and extrinsic incentives” in the form of awards, ranks or honors, similar to
the scheme developed by scouting organizations, a system that, “while not military,
had many elements which were capable of being treated almost as rigidly” (Ward,
1935, p. 42). The directors of summer camps “accepted this plan of points and
awards because it served as an easy means of control and of keeping the campers
busily occupied. It had not occurred to them that there might be some better way
to do it” (p. 47). Ward (p. 42) suggested that these practices seemed “to have been
taken along to camp as a matter of fact” because they were “common to the schools
of that day.”
Thus was transferred to out-of-school time and to activities not contemplated
in school curricula much of the same method of control and of stimulation

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 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

to activity which we find in the grades and examination system of public

schools. It is true the course was broader and there were more electives, but
the underlying philosophy and the principles of education were practically the
same. (Ward, 1935, p. 50)
While for most of the early camps “the chief purpose was recreational and the
great majority of camps have remained recreational” (Sargent, 1926, p. 27), this
did not preclude many camps from adopting a traditional structure like that found
in schools. The distinction between outdoor education and indoor education
started to collapse as practices normally associated with traditional education were
implemented in camps. Along with a focus on the curriculum and subject matter
came corresponding methods of instruction; for example, the encroachment of rigid
structures was exemplified in Ward’s (1935, pp. 59–61) description of one camp
where “intellectual,” “physical,” “service” and “devotional” were labels given to
categories that were subject to a battery of tests. Camps adopted methods similar
to those found in schools in order to more tightly manage their programs so as to
control the larger numbers of campers. And because these methods were employed
to manage all facets of camp life, the points and awards systems were, in effect, even
more intrusive than similar systems used in schools. Virtually no part of camp life
was devoid of points to be won, with awards used to affirm the smallest minutiae of
everyday camp living. The apparent goal of many of these systems was a compliant
camper, not unlike the school pupil in traditional education whose attitude must be
“one of docility, receptivity, and obedience” (Dewey, 1938, p. 18).
Even summer camps that continued to pursue aims that were primarily recreational
(rather than educational) subjected campers to the management methods used to
control larger numbers of children. But, notably, these recreational camps did not
trumpet any particular educational benefit from their programs. Some camp directors,
however, sought to expand the educational possibilities of the summer camp – Bill
Vinal among them. Hedley Dimock and Charles Hendry (1929, p. 1) observed “a
shift in emphasis from a recreational to an educational function for the summer
camp,” accompanied by the conspicuous presence of “marked transformations in
purpose, methods and leadership personnel.” Such a profound shift occurred “in
response to the newer currents which prevail in the field of educational theory and
practice” (p. 1). Ward (1935, p. 156) identified this as a trend among “many camp
directors … to become progressive educationalists,” and in so doing to be “more
experimental and critical in their attitude to their work.” These camp directors were
more “ready to think things through in their own situations rather than follow time-
worn traditions” (p. 156). Camps, in other words, increasingly became an arena of
concern for those with an interest in progressive education.
Many of the people involved with camping, directors and counsellors included,
were influenced to some degree by what they believed to be the basic tenets of
progressive education, to the extent that progressive camping grew to be something
of a term of art. Understandings of the concept of progressive camping, however,

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were not widely shared. “Progressive camping is a difficult conception in our

authoritarian, mechanized and tradition bound world,” Joshua Lieberman (1932,
p. 9) pointed out. As it was for teachers in schools, the wholesale change required
in educational thought in order to successfully move from traditional to progressive
camping – that is, camping as a form of progressive education – was demanding of
camp directors, many of whom did not have backgrounds in education. Nevertheless,
this did not impede the rise in popularity of progressive camping, at least as a slogan.
“Progressive camping not only is respected,” Lieberman (p. 9) mused, “but has
in some quarters become fashionable. As a result we have a drove of converts.”
But such popularity had its negatives as well as its positives. Lieberman (p. 9)
played down the movement’s apparent success, contending that “the ‘victory’ for
progressive education is being too easily won. We have many verbal converts whose
progressiveness consists largely of a new phraseology.”
In his own practice as a camp director, the progressive Lieberman (1932, p. 10)
was adamant that campers should be challenged to meet high standards and “be
helped to greater achievement, but at their own pace and in activities that arise out
of their own interests.” He (p. 10) justified this position by maintaining that “if the
activity represents the child’s own purpose he will seek expert help so that he may
gain skill and information and he will gain much strength from the process.” This
was an obvious shift towards a situation where more control was afforded to the
camper.

Figure 10. Girls making lamp shades and weaving baskets in front of the Craft Hut, 1927
(photo courtesy of Camp Winnataska, Pell City, Alabama).

Bernard Mason (1930, p. 10) likewise stressed the importance of the “present interests
of the campers,” although he was also aware that the reaction against the highly
regulated camp program may have swung too far at some camps and “developed

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 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

into an opposite theory that the camp should be entirely free from schedule so far
as activities were concerned.” To some this shift towards the interests of the camper
seemed to license a veritable free for all, reducing the role of counsellor to that of
tag-along. But this was not what Lieberman (1932, p. 11) intended; his was not a
“plea for a planless or chaotic camp”:
Such a course would bring about disastrous results. It is on the contrary a
plea for a most thoroughly planned summer. The camp site must be chosen
because it provides a stimulating and rich environment. The staff members
must be chosen because of their capacity to stimulate interests and guide
activity. Materials must be arranged so as to invite effort. The staff must be
prepared to take advantage of the unexpected, to utilize spontaneous interests
and occurrences, and utilize them in developing a larger plan. (Lieberman,
1932, p. 11)
Lieberman’s program emphasized the importance of the child and method, in its
relation to subject matter. His program was initially only minimally structured,
thus requiring the campers to be intimately involved in the planning process. The
central question was how involved the campers could be in the determination of the
program. In their description of such a program, Dimock and Hendry’s answer was
a telling one, revealing the extent to which progressive camping had moved beyond
traditional, adult-directed models:
In camps of this type no program of an organized sort exists until it emerges
from the needs and desires of the camp community. Subject matter or
information is considered a part of the resources of the camp to be introduced
to help meet a crisis, solve a problem, carry out a purposeful undertaking, or
satisfy an interest in the present camp experience. Artificial incentives and
controls consequently play an inconspicuous part. Campers and adults together
share in the control and conduct of the camp society. (Dimock & Hendry,
1929, p. 42)
In her book chronicling the history of American summer camps, Leslie Paris (2008)
reflects on Lieberman’s insights into this situation. “Lieberman acknowledged
that the progressive ideal was difficult to implement” (p. 243). There were “some
camp leaders who kept abreast of the latest educational initiatives,” and who “had
tried to reshape their curricula to the latest trends,” such as inclusion of “a free
period each day for campers to choose an activity, new ‘creative’ activities like
jewelry making, fewer awards, and greater use of educational terminologies”
(pp. 243–244). However “they remained unsure how to replace competitive stimuli
and adult-controlled programs” (p. 244). Thus, although “Lieberman concluded that
progressive camp leaders’ acknowledgement of children’s individuality, however
imperfectly realized, had changed the industry for the better” (p. 244), Paris echoed
Lieberman’s skepticism, pointing out that “the result of this experimentation … had
been confusion.” Again, even in camps – presumed to be uncontaminated by the

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strictures of schooling – the persistent societal confusion between subject matter

(curriculum) and method (child) lurked below the surface.

DEVELOPING TIGHTER LINKS BETWEEN CAMPING AND SCHOOLING

The critical question of camping’s relation to education raised the problem of the
isolation of camp from everyday urban life. This isolation was a characteristic of
a form of camping that had strongly appealed to those promoting its educational
value, such as Bill Vinal, because it enabled a form of education that was, at face,
radically different from school. Indeed, isolation had been touted as one of camping’s
fundamental virtues, especially from an educational perspective. “The camp is
an environment isolated from organized society, and is thereby influenced by a
minimum of direct supervision or control,” camping legend L.B. Sharp (1930, p. 44)
proclaimed. Because of this it presented “an ideal situation for the development of
desirable attitudes and appreciations of freedom and democracy” (p. 44). However,
its isolation – its main asset for some – was considered by others a serious limitation
reducing the possibility for camp lessons to influence life more broadly.
A qualifying statement should be made concerning the advantages of this
“naturalness” of camp life which is so constantly stressed by camp directors
and other writers. Camp life may be more “natural” than the city civilization
if we are thinking of the biological and inherited psychological factors in the
person. If the individual as social being is viewed realistically, however, the
“civilized” life of the town or city is his natural habitat. Life in the woods is
“unnatural.” Wholesome values, satisfying activities and effective adjustments
should characterize the normal community life of the individual. We may
discover that the greater the hiatus between camp life and civilized life, the less
the likelihood of transfer of the attitudes and habits stimulated in the camping
environment. (Dimock & Hendry, 1929, p. 6)
While a believer in the educational possibilities of school camps, William Heard
Kilpatrick (1929, p. xi) decried the fact that the camp was “intentionally removed
from ordinary life” as an “abiding weakness in the camp.” The camp “suffers from
discontinuity: discontinuity in point of time – it runs only in the summer; discontinuity
as regards life as a whole – it removes itself from people and it includes only one
type of person” (p. xi). A significant downfall of such a situation was that “‘transfer’
of learning is lessened from what we should like” (p. xi). In spite of these limitations,
however, Kilpatrick (p. xi) maintained that the summer camp stood “as a wonderful
opportunity to show both school and home how education may be conducted on the
inherent demands of education and life, two names for the same process if only we
conceive them adequately.” Kilpatrick (1942, p. 15) thus proffered that the camp
“provides real living, and so brings learning far and away better than does the older
type school. Hour for hour, a camp is often more educative than school because in it
the children can better live what they learn.”

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Figure 11. L. B. Sharp (left, in hat) talking with Tom Rillo (right, in hat), another outdoor
education pioneer, circa early 1950s at Sharp’s National Camp – his leadership training
camp for outdoor education in Pennsylvania (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

In an attempt to overcome the inherent discontinuities of camp, proponents of

progressive camping determined that camping “must be allied with other agencies
in the community which are responsible for the development of the boy and girl”
(Dimock & Hendry, 1929, p. 335). There was therefore a push for more connection
with these other aspects of a child’s life, founded in the belief that “the camping
experience should be more closely related to the year-long experience of the
camper” (p. 335). Hence, camping should be conceived as “an experience having
all-year-round implications and as an education involving many educational and
social agencies,” Elmer Mitchell (1938, p. 142) declared. Obviously, a central
aspect of the child’s year round existence was school. So, by bringing camping
within the gamut of the school the isolation of the camp would be reduced. Thus
Mitchell voiced the belief that “the summer camping experience of the child is
not an isolated one. It is tied up with all his other interests of the school year”
(p. 142), a comment evidencing some awareness of what Dewey called continuity
of experience. To this end the calls for a deliberately closer relation between
camping and schooling grew louder. Herbert Twining (1938, p. 138) noted that
while “camping and the activities of private schools have complemented one
another for many years … it has only been during the past decade that serious
consideration has been given to the possible relationship between the public
school curricula and camping.” Early in the 1930s, Ready (1933, p. 9) predicted
that “within the next decade, many week end and day camping excursions will
no doubt be included as a part of the regular school work carried on in public
schools, and many summer sessions will be held entirely out of doors in camps,”
a prediction that turned out to be fairly accurate – at least for a time. Just over

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a decade later Rey Carlson (see figure 18) reported that “about sixty school
systems in America are now experimenting with camping and outdoor education”
(1947, p. 8).

Figure 12. L. B. Sharp tending his fire in his tipi at National Camp in
Pennsylvania (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

Of all the advocates for school camping, perhaps the most fervent was L.B. Sharp.
He (1948, p. 315) believed it “educationally sound that school authorities should
establish a school camp as an integral part of the total school plant,” with the school
camp seen as “a necessary facility just as much as the library, the gymnasium, the
auditorium, and the laboratory.” Sharp (1943, p. 367) anticipated a time “when every
school” would “have its own campsite and operate it as an integral part of the total
school program.” And he (writing with E. G. Osborne) also held a more lofty hope
regarding the impact of camps on schools:
Is it possible to hope that teachers and administrators finding themselves a part
of a more informal and free situation in summer camps will make strenuous
efforts to bring something of the spirit, interest, and opportunity of this freer
kind of environment into the school? How can the experiences of camps and
schools become more unified? (Sharp & Osborne, 1940, p. 239)
For this dream to become a reality, Sharp realized that camping would need to be
accepted as a genuine part of schooling. And for this to occur, those involved with
camping had to gain legitimacy in addressing the school curriculum. Sharp (1943,
p. 363) was adamant that “changes in the school curriculum would be made” and

32
 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

he coined the term camping education in order to describe the form of outdoor
education he was promoting.
Camping education presents the basis for this change in the simple thesis: that
which ought and can best be taught inside the schoolrooms should there be
taught, and that which can best be learned through experience dealing directly
with native materials and life situations outside the classroom should there be
learned. Camping education is clearly an outdoor movement. This does not
mean that it would all take the place of the school, but certainly it means that
the school curriculum should be restudied and evaluated in terms of where is
the best place to learn the things that are educationally worthwhile. A careful
examination of subject matter and the curriculum on the basis of this simple
thesis will unquestionably show that a far greater amount of the school time
can more profitably be spent out-of-doors than is now the case with consequent
gain to pupils. (Sharp, 1943, pp. 363–364)

Figure 13. L. B. Sharp cooking a ritual evening meal at National Camp: a ‘buffalo tro.’
A buffalo tro (slang for throw) meant cooking what was usually a beefsteak by throwing
it directly on the coals (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

Sharp (1947, p. 43) declared this minor manifesto as “the basic thesis of outdoor
and camping education.” So approximately four decades after its appearance, the
banner of outdoor education was evolving to encompass school camping as a major
part of its practice. Camping education, or school camping, would sit alongside the

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CHAPTER 3

other educational programs considered part of an outdoor education. “It is certain,”

Julian Smith (1970, p. 4) later declared, “that organized camping had an important
influence on the beginnings of outdoor education, coupled with the educational
philosophies of Dewey, Kilpatrick, and others whose writings and leadership gave
rise to ‘progressive’ education.” The rise of camping education in the 1930s would
precipitate a long and vibrant period in the middle 20th century whereby outdoor
education was allied with general progressive aims. Thus, “the 1950s witnessed
rapid development of school camping, and the term outdoor education began to be
applied more generally” (Eells, 1986, p. 129).

Figure 14. Paddling together in the wilderness, 1948 (photo courtesy of

Clearwater Camp for Girls, Minocqua, Wisconsin).

OUTDOOR EDUCATION AS METHOD AND SUBJECT-MATTER

Alongside Sharp’s (1952, p. 20) principle of “using the out-of-doors wherever

possible” came his understanding of educational method. “It has been proved in
educational research that we learn most through direct experience, we learn faster,
the learnings are retained longer, and the appreciation is greater” (1948, p. 314).
The enormous breadth of subject matter content captured in the net of Sharp’s thesis
was unified through the method of outdoor education, a learning process that Sharp
associated with direct experience.
The evidence is clear that we learn best through direct experience. It has been
proved that learning of this kind is faster, is retained longer, and is accompanied
by deeper appreciation and understanding. Much, if not most, of the material
in all subject matter areas at all levels that school youth study about in school
can actually be seen and experienced firsthand outside the classroom and in the
school camp. It is chiefly a problem of dividing this subject matter for inside
and outside learning. (Sharp, 1947, p. 43)

34
 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

Sharp enlisted Dewey to undergird his thesis and substantiate his claim about what
could be learned through direct experience. He (1930, p. 37) cited Dewey’s (1911,
p. 400) definition of education, as listed in Monroe’s Cyclopedia of Education,
in his own early work: “Education may be defined as a process of the continuous
reconstruction of experience with the purpose of widening and deepening its
social content, while at the same time the individual gains control of the methods
involved.” However, where Dewey recognized the fundamental inseparability of
content and process in human experience, and upbraided progressives for omitting
subject matter from their theories (see Seaman & Rheingold, 2012; Westbrook,
1993), outdoor educators such as Sharp wittingly or unwittingly maintained their
distinction. The tension between them would subsequently define outdoor education,
as ‘direct experience’ became a core principle of the approach.
The tension inherent in Sharp’s thesis was illustrated in a study conducted by
Charles Lewis (1975) of much of the outdoor education literature published in the
USA between 1948 and 1968. In his study, Lewis (p. 3) vigilantly compiled a list
of seventeen hierarchically ordered “basic concepts of outdoor education” that were
“formulated as the generally-accepted principles of outdoor education” contained in
this published work. Each principle was based on “a minimum of three statements
of evidence … culled from the professional literature.” The resulting list was then
“presented to qualified practitioners and educators for validation” (p. 3). His aim
was to then offer this list “for the consideration of those who desire to implement
the method” (p. 3).

Figure 15. L. B. Sharp briefing a group of teachers at National Camp

where they are to live for their period of residency during the leadership
training program (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

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CHAPTER 3

Coursing through Lewis’s seventeen basic concepts was the tension between
method and subject matter. His study revealed that those teaching and writing
about mid-20th century outdoor education generally held the position that method
was more important than subject-matter. As his (1975, p. 3) first basic concept
stressed, “outdoor education is a method of education. It includes the use of the
out-of-doors for the study of all areas of the curriculum when the subject matter
can best be learned out-of-doors.” One of the main sources Lewis used in the
construction of this concept was Sharp’s thesis. Sharp (1947, p. 43) did not suggest
the learning of just any subject matter outdoors but only that subject matter which
could “best be learned” there, leaving the determination of the appropriate subject
matter to those involved in its teaching. In his second basic concept Lewis was
more prescriptive about method and he also acknowledged some of the specific
approaches encompassed under the banner of outdoor education. “The outdoor
education method encourages the use of the environment outside the classroom
and includes such experiences as field trips, excursions, vocational agriculture,
and a school camp” (Lewis, 1975, p. 3). His third basic concept made the focus on
method unequivocal: “outdoor education is not a separate discipline or a separate
area of study such as history, English, arithmetic, or other subject matter areas”
(p. 5). It was, in other words, decisively a method.

Figure 16. Camp Lincoln hikers climb Noonmark mountain in the Adirondacks, 1950s
(photo courtesy of North Country Camps, Keeseville, New York).

Evident in Sharp’s thesis, and in the basic concepts derived by Lewis, was an implicit
claim that method should prevail whenever any conflict between method and subject
matter should arise. Outdoor education was especially committed to using “direct

36
 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

experience” (Sharp, 1947, p. 43) to address a range of subject matter areas. Lewis’s
(1975, p. 5) fourth basic concept was the most emphatic in this regard. He echoed
Sharp in stating that outdoor education was “designed to provide direct rather than
vicarious experiences for students on the basis that the efficiency of education is
increased in direct proportion to that direct experience.” Central to Sharp’s thesis was
the distinction between learning through direct experience out-of-doors and learning
about something vicariously indoors, in a classroom, often in ways that reduced
the richness of direct experience to a more abstract symbolic representation. This
emphasis can be clearly seen in what Lewis called his “summary concept statement”
(p. 9), in which he encapsulated all seventeen of his basic concepts.
Outdoor education is a direct, simple method of learning that extends
the curriculum to the out-of-doors for the purpose of learning. It is based on
the discovery approach to learning and it appeals to the use of the senses – audio,
visual, taste, touch, and smell – for observation and perception. (Lewis, 1975, p. 9)
Based on his research, Lewis concluded that outdoor education was method first
and subject matter second. To this end he did recognize certain content areas in
some of his seventeen basic concepts. In concept seven, for instance, outdoor
education was understood to enhance “the goals of conservation by enabling
students to develop reverence for life through an ecological exploration of the
interdependence of living things and assist them in developing a land ethic which
illustrates man’s5 temporary stewardship of the land” (1975, p. 5). The eighth
concept identified the “major emphasis” of outdoor education to be “the teaching
of attitudes, appreciation, understanding, and expression rather than the mastery of
techniques and bodies of factual information” (p. 6). And in concept nine outdoor
education was acknowledged as providing “the opportunity to acquire basic skills,
attitudes, and appreciation for leisure-time pursuits” (p. 6). While these concepts
did not promote outdoor education as a body of knowledge as such, they did
identify certain contextual understandings children were presumed to glean through
the method of outdoor education – direct experience in the outdoors. Visible are two
main categories around which these content areas cohere: the natural environment
and outdoor leisure skills.

BEING OUT-OF-DOORS AND THE OUTDOORS

Although not directly referenced by Lewis, one conspicuous definition of outdoor

education during this period endeavoured to explicitly encompass both method and
subject matter. George and Louise Donaldson (1958) were, like Lewis, attempting to
deal with the issue of defining outdoor education so as to better inform teachers and
others who shared an interest in the approach. In addition, they perceived the need
to try to reduce the confusion surrounding the term: “Words, especially definitive
words, sometimes confuse a simple concept,” they (p. 17) believed. In their
estimation, “outdoor education is simple. It is as simple as a leisurely walk around

37
CHAPTER 3

the school grounds by a kindergarten teacher and her children.” In order to capture
this idea as elegantly and straightforwardly as possible, the Donaldsons (p. 17)
famously rendered outdoor education as “education in, about and for the outdoors.”
But this attempt to forge a simple definition for outdoor education glossed over the
significant tensions between the many different understandings of outdoor education
that had preceded them, such as those evidenced in Lewis’s seventeen basic concepts.
So rather than achieving simplicity, the Donaldsons actually introduced further
complexity and entrenched the confusion by creating three new divisions – in, about
and for – with the relations amongst these three remaining open to question.
The Donaldsons acknowledged both method (in the outdoors) and subject matter
(about the outdoors) in their definition. Both of these aspects of outdoor education
worked together in their assessment that a method of direct experience in the out-
of-doors could be applied in any area of the curriculum which was about the natural
environment. In this way, while restating the accepted notion that outdoor education
was a method applicable across the curriculum, the Donaldsons’ definition more clearly
emphasized the binary character of the term ‘outdoors.’ This term had been customarily
employed in contrast to the notion of indoors, thereby expressing a move out-of-doors
and away from the classroom. This was particularly evident in L.B. Sharp’s work
when he deliberately referred to outdoor education as out-of-door education. The
Donaldsons’ definition, however, emphasized the growing use of the term outdoors
in reference literally to the outdoors – understood as the natural environment. In an
educational sense, then, the Donaldsons precipitated the inevitable shift away from a
focus on method concerned with being out-of-doors to one oriented towards subject-
matter concerned with the outdoors as natural environment. This was, of course, not a
new development but another of the various turns involving process and content that
had dogged nature-study before outdoor education. The more open acknowledgement
that specific academic content could be featured in outdoor education added to the
tension between method and subject matter that inevitably surfaced in any sustained
discussion of outdoor education. The Donaldsons had produced a seemingly simple
definition that encompassed the breadth of outdoor education but in doing so had
created a composite that did not address the underlying tension.
In a further play on the complexity inherent in the meaning of outdoors, the
Donaldsons highlighted education for the outdoors. They (1958, p. 17) claimed that
‘for the outdoors’ contained “the key word” of their definition: “For implies both a
mental attitude toward the outdoors and a set of skills and abilities which will enable
the learner to do something about his attitudes. Skills are not enough; neither are good
attitudes without implementation” (p. 17). The Donaldsons thus married conservation
attitudes towards the outdoors as natural environment, with outdoor recreation skills
intended as leisure pursuits undertaken in the out-of-doors. For was meant to be the
connecting factor, linking the out-of-doors and the outdoors (see figure 3).
These two senses of outdoor, as outdoors (the natural environment) and
out-of-doors (a setting for recreation), mirrored the distinction Dewey (1916a,
p. 196) highlighted between “what we experience (the experienced) and the

38
 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

experiencing – the how,” with the educational ramifications being that “when we
give names to this distinction we have subject matter and method as our terms.” The
natural environment as experienced could be codified into subject-matter, while the
out-of-doors as experiencing referred to various methods for being out-of-doors.
The Donaldsons laudably attempted to frame outdoor education as concerned at
once with attitudes and knowledge, however, in handling each separately, their
definition remained beholden to the emphasis on method or subject-matter and did
not reconcile them as part of unified experience.
An earlier version of the Donaldsons’ notion of for the outdoors was claimed by
the Outdoor Education Project of the American Association for Health, Physical
Education and Recreation (Smith, Carlson, Donaldson & Masters, 1972, p. 22)
that began in 1955 and with which the Donaldsons were associated. Smith et al.
(p. 22) described education for the outdoors as focused on the “skills, attitudes
and appreciations necessary for intelligent use of the outdoors.” These were skills
“necessary for outdoor pursuits” that, while “often considered a part of physical
education and recreation programs,” also had “significance in science, conservation,
health, safety, citizenship, and other subjects which cut across all curriculum
areas” (p. 22). In tandem with this came “the development of attitudes concerning
conservation” that were “an important part of learning outdoor sports such as
camping, casting and angling, shooting, and hunting” (p. 22).
We note here for the reader, making a quick digression, that this sense of for has
ramifications beyond method and subject matter in connection with Dewey’s important
notion of ‘occupation,’ which offers a way forward and out of this confusion. In other
words, for highlights differing occupations which provide the meaningful framework
within which certain methods and subject matters make sense. In this paragraph in
Smith et al. (1972, p. 22), we can see different occupations being alluded to. We deal
with Dewey’s notion of occupation in much more detail in chapter six.

FOR being out-of-doors FOR the outdoors

in contrast to in-doors as natural environment
(e.g., outdoor recreator) (e.g., conservationist)

IN the out-of-doors ABOUT the outdoors

METHOD or PROCESS SUBJECT-MATTER or CONTENT

(adventure education) (environmental education)

Figure 17. The differing emphases on method and subject-matter in each of outdoor
education ‘in’ and ‘about,’ with ‘for’ the outdoors being applicable in different ways to both.
Shown in brackets are alignments with adventure education and environmental education (to
be covered in chapter 4), and the possible occupations associated with each understanding
of ‘for’ (to be discussed further in chapter 6).

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CHAPTER 3

For Smith et al. (1972, p. 20), however, there was no sense that outdoor education
could be constrained by the notion of about the outdoors, as outdoor education
meant “learning in and for the outdoors.” This was the position Smith (1960, p. 156)
had articulated more than a decade earlier. The conscious omission of a specifiable
area of content seemed especially important given the proclamation that “outdoor
education is not regarded as a specialized or circumscribed area of learning” (Smith
et al., 1972, p. 20). Thus Smith commented, “to circumscribe outdoor education – to
separate its many teachable moments from the learning areas which characterize its
diversity would render this new and fresh approach to learning less effective and
would place it in the category of other ‘special’ kinds of education” (1970, p. 7).

Figure 18. Rey Carlson, Director of Bradford Woods Outdoor Centre at

Indiana University, addressing a group during an outdoor education
class in 1965 (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

Equipped with this view, Smith campaigned strongly for an interdisciplinary

understanding of outdoor education from his position as Director of the Outdoor
Education Project at the American Association for Health, Physical Education and
Recreation. He (1966, p. 3) described “the educational decade in which the Project
emerged” as “characterized by contrasts.” “On the one hand there were strong forces
in support of the highly academic aspects of education. Gains made in outdoor
education against this backdrop are remarkable,” he (p. 3) commented, revealing
the consistency of his belief in outdoor education as method, as education in the
out-of-doors rather than about the outdoors. Pushing against these academic forces
were others more favourable to education in the out-of-doors. “The climate for the
emphasis on outdoor education has been good,” Smith (p. 3) claimed, “particularly
in view of the great surge of public interest in all forms of outdoor pursuits and in
the current national developments in support of resources and programs.” Here was

40
 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

outdoor education for being out-of-doors. From Smith’s perspective, there was
no need to emphasize any particular realm of subject matter, as this would simply
constrain the important practical contribution outdoor education was making
as method. Such academic constraint would simply limit outdoor education to a
specific area of subject matter, rendering it as one amongst other school subjects
rather than a method applicable to all.

Figure 19. Julian Smith (on the left of picture) receiving the first Taft Campus Outdoor
Education award in 1970 from Don Hammerman, Director of the Lorado Taft Field
Campus of Northern Illinois University (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

Smith (1966, p. 3) described the efforts of “the Project” as progressing “on two
fronts: interpreting the value of outdoor education in the learning process and in
academic achievement; and in helping educate for a more ‘literate’ outdoor public.”
Here again we can see education in and for the out-of-doors. However Smith’s
advocacy on these two fronts exposed further ambivalence, especially amongst
those in schools, where the existence of these two understandings of outdoor
education simply exacerbated the longstanding confusion that was always just below
the surface. Education in the out-of-doors and education for the out-of-doors were
considered by some to be two different forms of education. One was about a method
applicable across all school subjects (in the out-of-doors); the other was a form of
education that seemed to focus on certain outdoor pursuits (for the out-of-doors).
Hence the persistent question for those involved with school curricula was, as
Blackman (1969, p. 5) expressed it: “How does outdoor education fit within the school
program?”
The more I’ve focused upon using the out-of-doors for learning – education
“in” the out-of-doors, the more I’ve become concerned that education “for”

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CHAPTER 3

the out-of-doors may too easily become seen, in the eye of the non-outdoor
educator, as being all of outdoor education. Thus, I’m left with the dilemma of
how we can place primary emphasis upon utilizing the outdoor environment
to enhance a wide range of learnings, yet not lose sight of the significant skills
and understandings which better permit us to live in and utilize the outdoors
as human beings – those things classified as “for” the outdoors. (Blackman,
1969, p. 5)
Education in, about and for the outdoors, while simple on one level, opened up
many distinctions that resulted in a complex mix of differing versions of outdoor
education. The need for a solution to this dilemma was urged particularly by those
whose quest it was “to solidify a place for outdoor education in the curriculum”
so that outdoor education could “become an integral part of the curricula of the
American school” (Knapp, 1967, p. 8). With this goal in mind, Cliff Knapp (p. 8)
provocatively claimed that “the greatest single weakness has been the development
of a broad concept of the term [outdoor education].” “An all inclusive definition
tends to render the term ineffective” (p. 8). He (p. 8) argued instead that “the term
outdoor education should assume a meaning within the framework of modern
educational structure.” “Schools are placing more emphasis on academic programs,”
he (p. 12) noted. So, arguing against an exclusive commitment to method, Knapp
proclaimed that “outdoor educators must rise to this challenge and support this need.
Outdoor education cannot attempt a reversal of this trend, but must function within
this structure if success is to be realized” (p. 12).

Figure 20. Cliff Knapp, with pencil on ear, teaching elementary education majors
about contours, during an outdoor education class at Carbondale, Southern
Illinois University in 1964 (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

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 OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND INDOOR EDUCATION

Knapp’s (1967, p. 12) advice was for educators to choose between two viewpoints:
one “outdoor recreation, camping,” the other “phases of school and college
curriculum.” He also asserted his preference for which of these two emphases should
prevail as outdoor education: “The meaning of the term should be reserved for use
by educators in reference to outdoor curriculum” (p. 12). Outdoor education would
not then encompass “the fields of camping and outdoor recreation,” which Knapp
(p. 12) believed “should remain as distinct professions.” Instead, outdoor education
was the outdoor curriculum, which altered “the regular indoor curriculum by
increasing content and providing an effective means for learning the content”
(p. 9). This refinement of the meaning of outdoor education was noted by Donaldson
(1972, p. 9), who claimed that “the early ‘holistic’ approach” in outdoor education,
“especially in resident programs, has been largely replaced by great emphasis on
the academic.” Mid-20th century outdoor education was going through the same
reform cycle as its predecessor, nature-study, moving from a commitment to outdoor
education as method to outdoor education as subject matter.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we have outlined the cycles of reform that first appeared with nature-
study in the late 1800s and continued through the progressive camping education
movement in the mid 20th century. These waves of reform shared common phases.
First, there was dissatisfaction with the traditional classroom-based system of
education, combined with a concern for loss of firsthand contact with nature (and
thus, from the perspective of cultural values, a loss of care for nature). Both of these
were also usually married with a commitment to child-centeredness. Second, there
appeared an ultimate shift toward and embrace of academic content as a crucial
part of education – i.e., the outdoors specifically as, or at least allied with, subject
matter. The pattern we have outlined thus began with commitments to method and
eventually gave way to subject matter, laying the groundwork for yet another cycle.
Following on the heels of camping education in the 1960s, the confusion evident
throughout the first half of the 20th century would be exacerbated with the emergence
of another new movement: adventure-based outdoor education. While this new
movement ushered in exciting new practices that leveraged popular outdoor activities,
it did little to reconcile the method/subject matter dichotomy principally because it
amplified the emphasis on direct experience without specification of subject matter.
And, in some ways, adventure-based outdoor education actually sent the tension
deeper underground by merging with constructivist and ‘human potential’ ideologies
to treat method as subject matter. But, as we will show (with Dewey’s help), even
the explicit attempts during this period at refining the definition of outdoor education
did little to offer a way out of the confusion between method and subject matter – a
confusion that still confounds attempts at substantive educational reform involving
the outdoors.

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NOTES
1
While the term itself was not in general use before the 1880s, we shall continue to use the term nature-
study with hyphen inserted following the example of Meyers (1910, 1911).
2
This training in zoology and botany was not of the university type we are familiar with today, but
rather some coverage of these areas in a basic form gained by these individuals either in secondary
(high) school or through normal school training.
3
Pyle (2001, p. 19) noted that “in 1911 Comstock published a large book called the Handbook of
Nature-Study, replete with hundreds of lessons as well as relevant poems, photographs, and vignettes.”
Comstock’s book enjoyed more success than Jackman’s, and it “became one of the most universal
texts in the American classroom” (p. 19).
4
Kliebard (2004, p. 137) notes that Kilpatrick was “an avowed disciple of Dewey’s.”
5
The use of man as a collective term is problematically dated but we have included it when used by
other authors in quotations because of the difficulty posed by making changes. However we interpret
this term as inclusive of all human beings and we do not employ it ourselves.

44
 CHAPTER 4

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND

A DESIRE FOR ADVENTURE

OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

The ongoing conflicts about outdoor education, characterized by differing

viewpoints on whether outdoor education was in, about or for the outdoors – or
some combination – was further influenced by a significant change in the way the
natural environment was being considered in the USA and around the world. In
the 1950s and 1960s “public concern for the environment has increased,” McEvoy
(1972, p. 221) reported, a judgment he based on a range of indicators including “a
striking increase in the number of environmentally oriented articles appearing in US
periodicals” (p. 218) and “a recent and sharp membership increase in the voluntary
organizations which are most active in implementing preservationist environmental
policies” (p. 220). McEvoy, an environmental sociologist, hypothesized two trends
responsible for this change: “The first of these is the probable increase in Americans’
personal exposure to their natural environments [chiefly by way of recreational
activities]. The second is the clear and demonstrable deterioration in quality of many
aspects of the natural rural and especially urban, environment” (p. 221).
Laszlo (1972, p. 14) connected this increase in public concern with the emergence
of “a new concept of the environment,” one which was “more reminiscent of classical
Hellenic and Oriental modes of thought than of the technology-adoring ethic of
changing the world and improving it for human benefit.” General conceptions of
the character of the relation between people and nature were, ostensibly, becoming
less dualistic and more integrated. “Man was long considered above or outside
of nature – first as spectator, then a manipulator of it. In the new concept of the
environment man is placed within nature, as an integral part of it” (p. 17). Such
an understanding of the unity inherent to the relationship between human beings
and nature had already been articulated within outdoor education and, of course, in
indigenous communities for centuries (Roberts, 2012), but it was catching hold in
educators’ imaginations. As Bud Wiener (1967, p. 699) pointed out, “perhaps most
basic to continued development [in outdoor education] is the recognition of … the
belief in the unity of nature and man’s place in that unity.”

The outdoors as a setting for education, especially in more natural areas,

exemplifies a uniqueness that abounds in beauty, mystery and power. Man as
a part of a universal unity is challenged to discover, analyze, interpret and use
that which surrounds him. (Wiener, 1967, p. 699)

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CHAPTER 4

Recognition of this unity, combined with the changes in public concern for the
environment, underpinned a discernible shift in perception of the educational
opportunities afforded by outdoor education. Just as outdoor education had initially
offered an alternative to indoor education, it now came to be viewed as a bulwark
against an impending environmental crisis. “This interest in natural areas and natural
resource management during the Kennedy years caused many educators to examine
and explore the school curriculum” (Kirk, 1975, p. 4). This was done with the aim
of finding a way “to provide young Americans with a better understanding of their
responsibility to use more wisely and, where possible, to replenish resources which
were being consumed” (p. 4). Kirk (p. 4) maintained that, “of the entire educational
fraternity, the segment best equipped to provide meaningful experiences which
would develop an appreciation for land management were those of us engaged in
outdoor education.” Problematically however, when this environmental problem
was merged with the other major factor that had shaped outdoor education’s
evolution – to counteract classroom based education – confusion was exacerbated,
not reduced.
With the increasing characterization of the environment as a problem,
considerations of outdoor education as in, about and for the outdoors became
more strongly associated with the needs of the natural environment per se, causing
educators to turn toward the emerging field of environmental education. In other
words, the environment was eclipsing other possible meanings of outdoor. Lucas
(1979, p. 50)1 argued that “the label ‘environmental education’ makes literal sense
when applied to a number of different classes of educative programs. It can refer to
education about the environment, for the (preservation of the) environment or in the
environment.” For Lucas, both education about and for were specifically concerned
with the environment.
The programmes of education for the environment aim to assist the preservation
or improvement of the environment for a particular purpose; contrast this with
education about the environment, where the goal is a knowledgeable individual.
Typical programmes for the environment will attempt to inculcate attitudes
of concern for the features of the environment that enhance the chances of
continued human life, which enhance the quality of man’s life or which are
claimed to have value in and of themselves. (Lucas, 1979, p. 52)
From Lucas’s perspective, the only mode of environmental education that could be
connected with education out-of-doors was education in the environment. “Education
in the environment is characterized by the use of a particular pedagogic technique,
whereas education about and education for the environment are characterized
by the type of goals the programmes have” (Lucas, 1979, p. 54, emphasis in
original). He further noted, alluding to the out-of-doors, that “the most general use
of ‘environment’” in the sense of in the environment was “the world outside the
classroom” (p. 54).

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 THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND A DESIRE FOR ADVENTURE

OUTDOOR EDUCATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

The method/subject matter confusion within outdoor education was now compounded
by the conflation of outdoor education with environmental education. This tension
was taken up directly by Phyllis Ford (1981, p. 1) who advanced the phrase “Outdoor/
Environmental Education,” although she mainly used the term outdoor education.
Ford (p. 12) selected the Donaldsons’ definition (1958) as the basis for her own
“recommended definition” of outdoor education, which even she called “overly
simplistic.” In contrast to the Donaldsons and Smith, Ford began with the premise that
outdoor education was a subject in its own right, thereby taking outdoor education
a further step towards a defined body of content knowledge. “It is this author’s
contention,” she (1981, p. 69) proclaimed, “that outdoor education is a subject.” Ford
saw the choice as one between education and recreation. Like Knapp (1967), but with
a slightly different emphasis, Ford (1981, p. 69) asked: “Is outdoor education the
domain of educational agencies, or is it the domain of recreational agencies?”
To many people in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia, outdoor
education is synonymous with education for outdoor pursuits or recreational
skills. Snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, winter survival skills, backpacking,
fishing, hunting, and related outdoor pursuits that are physical in nature (i.e.
nonmechanized) and rely on the natural environment for implementation are
the sole topics …. On the other hand, as many or more people feel that outdoor
education is outdoor science education and consists only of teaching about
natural resources and their interrelationship. Between the two poles of this
spectrum are many people who seem to compromise on some, albeit weak,
combination of the two issues. There are also those who would not agree with
either point of view, because they feel that outdoor education is not a separate
subject, but rather a process of teaching (any subject) in the outdoors. (Ford,
1981, p. 69)

Ford’s (1981, p. 12) interpretation of education in the outdoors as establishing “the

location” of what she described as an “educational process” closely paralleled that
of the Donaldsons (1958), Knapp (1967), Smith et al. (1972), and Lucas (1979). But
for Ford, its method of ‘direct experience’ was not the defining aspect of outdoor
education. Ford detailed a teaching progression that emphasized “problem-solving
processes” (1981, p. 91) as a central feature. Yet these problem-solving processes
would only be introduced following the acquisition indoors of academic content
concerning ecology and environmental science. Only “after gaining an understanding
of what occurs in every ecosystem” was the learner “prepared for and ready for outdoor
education activities that teach the application of knowledge of the environment to the
solution of problems related to it,” she (p. 91) stipulated. And “the most commonly
used problem-solving activities relate to soil, water, trees, and animals” (p. 91). This
was, for Ford, unequivocally the subject matter of outdoor education.

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Figure 21. Phyllis Ford speaking with Bud Wiener (photo courtesy of Clifford Knapp).

Ford (1981, p. 12) was aware that “education about the outdoors dictates subject
matter and has thus produced controversy.” “On this topic, outdoor educators are
divided,” she (p. 12) acknowledged. “Some believe that outdoor education must
be about outdoor resources and/or outdoor skills, whereas others feel that outdoor
education is not a subject, but a location and a process whereby one can learn
any subject through the outdoors” (p. 12). Here Ford drew a distinction between
education about the outdoors as subject-matter and interdisciplinary education in
the outdoors. Ford’s stance on outdoor education as a subject clarified her position
in this controversy. She adopted a standpoint similar to Lucas (1979), who saw
education about and for the environment as characterized by content-based curricular
goals, while education in the environment was distinct from both, characterized as
a pedagogic technique applicable in any subject. She advocated strongly for the
former, her understanding of education for the outdoors closely aligning with
outdoor education as subject-matter. Education for the outdoors was “for use of
the outdoors: wise use for leisure pursuits; wise use for economic purposes” (1981,
p. 13). It was also “for understanding the outdoors: understanding the relationship
of natural resources to world survival; understanding the importance of a sense
of stewardship; understanding our historical and cultural heritage (as read in the
outdoors); understanding the aesthetics of the outdoors” (p. 13). Here both ‘use’ (as
wise use) and ‘understanding’ were primarily considered not as method, but as the
subject matter of outdoor education, as content to be taught.

ADVENTURE EDUCATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

Adventure educator Simon Priest (1986) weighed into this “confusion associated
with the definition of the term outdoor education” (p. 15) with the aim of “redefining

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outdoor education” (p. 13). Like Ford, Priest (p. 13) highlighted the Donaldsons’
definition, calling it “the classic definition of outdoor education.” Yet at the same
time he noted that this definition had been “criticized from many viewpoints”
(p. 13). Priest therefore abandoned the attempt to simply discuss what else outdoor
education was in, about and for and instead strove to develop a new framework
that encompassed both being out-of-doors and the outdoors itself. He took issue
with the dichotomy others seemed to promulgate, especially the emphasis on the
natural environment which grew from the environmental movement. His approach
was to broaden the definition by re-incorporating the dormant out-of-doors element.
“Some believe that the purpose of outdoor education is not sensible stewardship,
but independent learning, free thinking, and self-reliant problem solving,” Priest
(p. 13) claimed. “Others feel that there is more to learn about than just the outdoor
environment” (p. 13). These others “claim that the personal environment and
socialization are equally important topics which lend themselves to outdoor
education learning situations” (p. 13).
Capturing these differing perspectives, Priest (1986, p. 14) identified two
main forms of outdoor education: “environmental education” and “adventure
education.” He maintained that outdoor education should be the banner or umbrella
encompassing both of these forms. This put him at odds with Ford, Lucas, and others
who believed that the proper banner was environmental education. “An expansion of
outdoor education is environmental education, which is broader and all inclusive,”
Ford (1981, p. 14) remarked. Kirk (1975, p. 15) also considered environmental
education to be more fundamental, as well as urgent, created when “environmental
problems increased in significance and number” thereby forcing “the philosophical
components of outdoor education and conservation education2 on a collision
course.” As the external pressures of the environmental crisis increased, Kirk (p. 15)
considered a blending of outdoor education and conservation education to have
occurred, resulting in a “quantum jump which produced the field of environmental
education.”
Proponents of the phrase environmental education, however, virtually ignored
adventure education, which was rising in popularity. Adventure education appeared
to merge camping and outdoor recreation and highlighted the personal and social
aspects of being out-of-doors away from traditional modes of education. Its early
expansion in the 1960s was attributable to three main cultural and educational
trends. First was “the emergence of widespread interest in such outdoor sports as
backpacking, mountaineering, cross-country skiing, and bicycle touring, between
1965 and 1974” (Wilson, 1977, p. 54). These outdoor pursuits began to rival fishing
and hunting as the primary ways to educate for being out-of-doors. Referring to
a study of the “comments and writings of the new wilderness sport participants,”
Wilson (p. 55) revealed that “their involvement was motivated by two closely related
desires. One quite simply was the wish to escape the technology and urbanization
of modern living. The second was the desire to achieve a greater sense of self-
awareness.”

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Figure 22. Kurt Hahn addressing an audience at The Athenian School in northern
California in 1965 (photo courtesy of The Athenian School archive).

Second amongst these cultural and educational trends was the importation of German
educator Kurt Hahn’s ideas into elite boarding schools along with the adaptation of
his UK-based Outward Bound program to a US context (Miner & Bolt, 1981). A
closely related third influence was the widespread growth of a humanistic, self-help
ethos in the 1970s, which ushered in new forms of interpersonal training, including
in the very schools where adventure was taking root (Armstrong, 1990). Outdoor
education thus came to be seen as a prime vehicle for personal development (Katz &
Kolb, 1968; Vokey, 1987), and as adventurous sports became incorporated into
education programs, the focus on self improvement through outdoor pursuits became
central: “the defining characteristic of adventure education is that a conscious and
overt goal of adventure is to expand the self, to learn and grow and progress toward
the realization of human potential” (Miles & Priest, 1990, p. 1).
While adventure education programs may teach such skills as canoeing,
navigation, rock climbing and rappelling, the teaching of such skills is not
the primary goal of the enterprise. The learnings about the self and the world
that come from engagement in such activities are the primary goals. (Miles &
Priest, 1990, p. 1)
Hahn’s (1957) Outward Bound program, first developed in the UK in the 1930s and
1940s, indelibly influenced adventure education in the US and many other countries:
“any history of adventure education must start with Hahn,” announced Miles and
Priest (1990, p. 53). As Outward Bound arrived in the United States in 1962 (Zook,
1986, p. 55), Hahn’s wartime emphasis on “muscular Christianity” gave way to
a new focus on self-improvement and social relations (Freeman, 2011; Millikan,

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 THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND A DESIRE FOR ADVENTURE

2006). In their account of the first Outward Bound course to run in the USA, for
instance, Miner and Bolt (1981, p. 103) commented on “the ultimate discovery”
by each participant “that more than anything else Outward Bound is a revelation of
people’s interdependence and a challenge to their ability to work together.”

Figure 23. Students and instructors at Hurricane Island Outward Bound

School prepare for a round-the-island overnight hike with homemade
backpacks – another test of their individual initiative and craftsmanship –
at Cross Island in 1967 (photo courtesy of Jim Garrett).

In this tradition, learning about the environment was secondary to using the
environment to learn about the self and others. But such a seemingly definitive
understanding of outdoor education as adventure education was still tempered by
old divisions, as evidenced in the story of Outward Bound expatriate Paul Petzoldt,
who helped establish “the first American Outward Bound program in Colorado and
became chief instructor” (1974, p. 13). In 1965 Petzoldt moved on from Outward
Bound to found the National Outdoor Leadership School, whose lengthy wilderness
expeditions looked superficially like Outward Bound but where “perhaps” the “most
important purpose” was “to teach practical conservation” (p. 14).
Predictably, debates ensued concerning distinctions between adventure education
and environmental education. Yet for many, these two remained elements of a
broader idea of outdoor education. Priest, for one, conceived of this larger whole
as one built on different types of relation. From this perspective environmental
education was concerned with the relational features within nature itself, as well
as with human-nature relations. But these were not the only relations significant in
outdoor education. There were also those relations important to adventure education,
specifically psychological aspects of the self as well as social relations among those
who pursued adventures, which in the case of Outward Bound occurred in the
prescribed group size of 8–15 members (Walsh & Golins, 1976).

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Figure 24. Flanked by his. cooking gear – #10 cans, one of which has been
fashioned into a Hibachi stove – a student waves to signal that all is well during
his Solo experience during an Outward Bound course at Hurricane Island in
the 1960s (photo courtesy of Jim Garrett).

Even though recognized as a foremost adventure educator, Priest ostensibly shared

with environmental educators their urgent, conservationist attitudes. “Adventure
approaches,” he wrote, “need to deal with environmental issues if they are to
protect the setting they treasure so greatly …. And environmental approaches
need to develop confident individuals who solve problems cooperatively and
who can make sound judgments regarding the stewardship of our planet” (1986,
pp. 14–15). He considered the two primary relationships in adventure education
to be intrapersonal and interpersonal, while the two of greatest concern for
environmental education were ecosystemic and ekistic: “Adventure education
programs, involving outdoor pursuits, have traditionally concentrated on the
intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships” (p. 14). Alternatively “environmental
education programs, involving ecological studies, have traditionally concentrated
on the ecosystemic and ekistic relationships” (p. 14). However, as they undoubtedly
blended together in actual outdoor education practice, Priest sought an integrated
definition: “each approach may still retain a primary focus on one pair of
relationships but would also, by the very nature of being outdoors, touch on the
other two” (p. 14). Employing these understandings, Priest (p. 13) tried innovatively
to cut through the confusion by offering a “redefinition of the term outdoor
education”:
Outdoor education is an experiential process of learning by doing, which takes
place primarily through exposure to the out-of-doors. In outdoor education
the emphasis for the subject of learning is placed on RELATIONSHIPS,
relationships concerning people and natural resources. (Priest, 1986, p. 13)

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 THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND A DESIRE FOR ADVENTURE

Importantly, Priest’s emphasis on relationships was not achieved by focusing on

common content but rather by placing the notion of direct experience first and
foremost in considerations of outdoor education. Through ‘learning by doing,’
participants would discover the inherent connections between self, others, and nature.
Unlike Ford, he did not emphasize academic content as primary to engagement with
the outdoors; it was direct experience that enabled any content to be encountered,
any relationship to be capitalized on for educational ends. “Through exposure
to the outdoor setting individuals learn about their relationship with the natural
environment, relationships between the various concepts of natural ecosystems, and
personal relationships with others and their inner Self,” Priest (1986, p. 15) argued.
Priest introduced holism to outdoor education at a time marked by division, but
in retrospect a similar notion had been with outdoor education from its early days;
historically this was not a new development. L.B. Sharp had already noted how the
direct experience of camp determined the subject matter of camp. “Various problems
arise out of the natural process of caring for one’s self, adjusting to the environment,
and enjoying activity in camp and particularly in the more primitive conditions of
the small camping units, overnight camping, and outpost camps” (1930, p. 45). And
it is “these problems” that “afford the primary opportunities for learning in camp
life” (p. 45). Sharp (pp. 45–46) summed these problems up by describing them as
“matters of hygiene,” “matters of a sense of civic responsibility – the essence of
citizenship,” and “matters of nature”; or in other words, relationships among self,
others and nature.

OUTDOOR EDUCATION AS EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION

One can infer from Priest’s definition that direct experience was to be given
foremost consideration in outdoor education, especially adventure education. If an
‘experience’ was conducted properly, children could learn whatever subject matter
was at hand, and probably even some that weren’t explicitly intended. In other
words, these discoveries were enabled by proper methods. Of course subject matter
could not be disconnected from method; direct experience (experiencing) was an
experience of something (experienced). Notably, however, Priest’s definition subtly
reversed the priorities of environmental education, especially in the accounts of Ford
and Lucas. There direct experience tended to take a back seat to subject matter,
which framed the design of educational experiences. Subject matter came first,
thereby necessitating a design geared towards learning pre-specified knowledge.
An initial learning experience was usually indoor and classroom based, augmented
with a fieldtrip that would help people establish firsthand knowledge of the content.
Yet, among advocates of direct experience, even a fieldtrip of this type could be
construed as insufficiently direct. It was, in essence, a continuation of indoor
education, yielding data or other observations connected with a problem or issue
already introduced in advance by the teacher. Having been encountered in this way,
the problem was likely to remain owned by the teacher, rather than emanating from

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students’ own firsthand activity. Direct experience thereby contained an implicit

emphasis on method.
The period of experiential education. It was during a 1974 conference in
the US oriented towards outdoor pursuits that the focus on direct experience as
method secured its place in the pantheon of late 20th century reforms: “experiential
education” became a new watchword that fuelled a movement (Garvey, 1990). The
advocacy for experience as method was now not confined to adventure education
but was taken up by others as well; subsequent conferences attracted not only those
with an interest in Outward Bound-style programs but “regular classroom teachers”
too, as Dan Garvey (p. 77) described them. It seemed to these early members of the
Association for Experiential Education that “outdoors people were coming indoors
and indoor people were moving outdoors” (Shore & Greenberg, 1978, p. 45). Direct
experience became a central pillar of outdoor education.
We want to take a quick detour here and bring Dewey more directly into the
conversation, as most discussions about the educative value of direct experience
situate themselves in Deweyan territory. Experiential education is certainly no
exception to this; he is recognized by many as one of “the forefathers of experiential
education” (Breunig, 2011, p. 62). But what many reformers overlook is the fact that
Dewey found advocacy-based arguments about ‘direct experience’ in education to
be very problematic (a significant reason behind his equivocal support of reforms
such as manual training and home credits). It was clear to him that even in the
traditional classroom, where the focus was chiefly on subject matter, experiences
were being had: “It is a great mistake to suppose, even tacitly, that the traditional
schoolroom was not a place in which pupils had experiences” (1938, p. 26). Indoor
classroom experiences had their own structure and meaning, often geared towards
the learning of subject-matter for the purposes of testing and grading and the
eventual, supposed mastery of a defined and logical body of knowledge. Dewey
had a more complex stance on subject matter than its discovery in direct experience,
arguing that it “must be restored to the experience from which it has been abstracted.
It needs to be psychologized” (1902b, p. 22). In other words, despite the reality
that classroom experiences were direct in their own special way, the meaning of
subject-matter could not be disconnected from how it gained initial significance
in non-classroom human activity. Notably, Dewey’s position here differs from
both Ford’s, who wanted subject matter emphasized prior to a non-classroom
experience, and Priest’s, who emphasized direct experience generically as capable
of addressing an array of subject matter goals. Dewey’s argument on this point was
not well developed by subsequent reformers, particularly experiential educators
championing adventure-based activity in the outdoors. We will return to this point in
Chapter 6.
Without consciously doing so, advocates of experiential education were recreating
the same reform cycle that nature-study and camping education had undergone years
before. For example, Richard Kraft (1985, p. 7) wrote that “the immediate reasons
for the reanalysis of the role of experience in learning” came “from the failure of

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contemporary schooling to meet the needs of large portions of youth.” Further to this,
“every major national study of the problems of youth, adolescents and the secondary
schools and universities in the 1970s made similar recommendations concerning
the need for experiential modes of learning” (p. 7), a necessity prescribed “for most,
if not all youth, in the last quarter of the twentieth century.” Zajchowski (1978,
p. 12) made a similar observation when he asserted that “experiential education is
the keystone of current educational reform literature.” The motivational problems
with classroom-based education were again a central issue. The pedagogical
response, however, now bore the name experiential education, a movement that
highlighted the association between method and experience, a connection Sharp had
earlier acknowledged. Hammerman (1980, p. 126) predicted that this next cycle
of development in outdoor education “might well be labelled – ‘The Period of
Experiential Education.’”
The period of experiential education involved a more refined turn to method.
Method was now the process of experiencing, placing major emphasis on manipulating
the structures of experience itself. Efforts by those concerned with experiential
education to model these structures drew inspiration from Dewey, with obvious
significance being given to the connection between experience and education –
the title of one of his books published in 1938. There Dewey characterized thinking
as an active process of inquiry, a form of ‘doing’ in its own right (see also Dewey,
1933). In experiential education, however, a distinction was often drawn between
doing and thinking; a dichotomy that was encoded in dominant conceptions of
experiential learning adopted during this period. “Experience [doing] alone is
insufficient to be called experiential education, and it is the reflection process which
turns experience into experiential education,” wrote experientialist Laura Joplin
in 1981 (p. 17). Experiential education was constituted by “an ‘action-reflection’
cycle” (p. 17). So, while doing or action was important, learning depended on a
subsequent moment of thinking – or ‘reflection’ as it came to be called. Joplin (p. 19)
referred to this reflecting process as a “debrief.” In their textbook for adventure
educators, Simon Priest and Michael Gass (1997, pp. 144–146) identified a number
of experiential education models that expressed this basic structure, including David
Kolb’s (1984) theory of experiential learning and development, as well as ideas
drawn from Dewey. We discuss this conception in greater detail in the next chapter,
presenting an alternative reading of Dewey.
The period of experiential education in outdoor education is most clearly
marked by this emphasis on doing or activity followed by reflection. Notably,
this design structure stems less from any affiliation with conservationist attitudes
or environmental knowledge, but from its philosophical commitment to self-
improvement and its pedagogical emphasis on direct experience as method. As
Hammerman (1980, p. 126) acknowledged, this was “a period in which the ‘form’
or ‘structure’ of the program (e.g., residential)” was “not the most important factor
to be considered, but one in which the learning processes and teaching strategies are
of greater significance.” Although prominent advocates of experiential education

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drew directly or indirectly on Dewey to advance their claims, the emphasis on the
process of learning, rather than its contents, did little to alleviate the longstanding
educational confusion between method and subject matter he tried repeatedly to
overcome.
The debate, of course, continued to play out in the practical and scholarly
literature. Ted Wichmann (1980), commenting on significant early developments in
experiential learning theory, criticized the one-sided nature of this emphasis. “Walsh
and Golins (1976), Gager (1977) and Greenberg (1978) have all developed process-
centered experiential learning theories” (p. 9). However, while “each of these three
papers describes in detail how the experiential learning process flows, … all avoid
any detailed discussion of what is to be learned” (p. 9). Wichmann called this “the
process-centered syndrome.” A year later, in their historical account of experiential
education’s evolution from progressivism, Albert Adams and Sherrod Reynolds
(1981) described a similar realization:
It is evident that [current experiential reforms] have retained what Ed Yeomans,
an historian of the progressive movement, fondly refers to as the ‘adventure,
romance, and life in community’ reminiscent of the early Romantics. But the
corresponding emphasis on academic rigor and an integrated approach to the
arts in many instances has been minimized or eliminated. (p. 27)
Priest’s relational redefinition of outdoor education, discussed above, can be read as
an attempt to address Wichmann’s point and forge some connection, however loose,
to subject matter. However, Priest’s focus on relationships was in practice so broad
an identification of content that it lent little specificity to outdoor education, which
again was serving as a banner term covering an ever growing list of educational
initiatives. Thus, in the 1980s and 1990s, with no substantial resolution to Dewey’s
‘confusion,’ outdoor education was still contributing to the major problem of the
crowded curriculum rather than offering any fundamental reform strategy for
education.

A RECENT TURN: OUTDOOR EDUCATION AS PLACE-BASED EDUCATION

Although adventure education usually occurred in the outdoors, environmental

knowledge or conservationist values were not emphasized or even necessary to the
approach. Nature had, to some critics, become a mere backdrop for self-discovery
rather than a focus in its own right; worse than mere anthropocentrism, this could
be seen as a kind of narcissism. Any environmental understanding or commitment
to conservation was purely incidental: as Seaman and Rheingold (2012) write, “the
idea became that where learning occurs is less important than what you, personally,
learn about yourself” (p. 260). One study even found a wilderness-based adventure
program to be detrimental to students’ attitudes toward and understanding of
nature (Haluza-deLay, 2001). Some critics have gone further, suggesting that the
preoccupation with self-improvement actually exploits nature for human gain,

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thereby promoting a self-absorbed kind of individualism that tacitly indoctrinates

people to the divisive values of global capitalism rather than promoting any kind of
ecological harmony (Bowers, 2005; Brookes, 2002).
Educators in the critical theory tradition have long made this argument about mass
schooling in general (see Apple, Au & Gandin, 2009). Schools’ emphasis on abstract,
universal knowledge, they maintain, devalues and detracts from the practical, local
concerns that people are most knowledgeable about, have most control over, and
have the greatest stake in improving. Some environmental educators who share this
perspective (see Orr, 2002) sought to give nature, especially in local places, a more
prominent role in outdoor educational practice. Thus emerged place-based education,
what Woodhouse and Knapp (2000, p. 2) called “a recent trend in the broad field
of outdoor education.” It is “a relatively new term, appearing only recently in the
education literature” (p. 6). David Gruenewald (2003a, p. 3) connected place-based
education with other reforms such as “… experiential learning, contextual learning,
problem-based learning, constructivism, outdoor education, indigenous education,
environmental and ecological education, bioregional education, democratic education,
multicultural education, community-based education, critical pedagogy …, as well as
other approaches,” but especially those “concerned with learning from and nurturing
specific places, communities, or regions.” At the start of the 21st century, “place”
became a preeminent concern in outdoor experiences.
According to Smith (2002, p. 586), the aim of place-based education “is to ground
learning in local phenomena and students’ lived experience.” Yet Gruenewald argues
that place-based education is an advance over old priorities, not simply education in
the out-of-doors, a method for teaching that which could “best be learned” there, as
Sharp (1943, p. 364) had put it. “In order to avoid the common assumption that place-
based education is merely a methodology or technique through which to deliver
standard school curriculum,” Gruenewald (2005, p. 263) stresses “a philosophical
orientation that embraces place as a construct fundamental to the purpose, process
and structure of schooling.”
Gregory Smith (2002, p. 594) contends that “the primary value of place-based
education lies in the way it serves to strengthen children’s connections to the regions
in which they live.” Important here are “local phenomena ranging from culture
and politics to environmental concerns and the economy” (p. 594). For example,
Gruenewald (2005, p. 263) emphasizes “place consciousness” and suggests “an
awareness of other places beyond one’s own local environment; fostering such an
awareness and examining the interrelationship between places, such as the local
Walmart and the distant factories that produce and export cheap goods.” Here place is
not only the outdoors taken as natural environment; it is a window into humankind’s
role in the social and natural ecology. As Smith (2007, p. 190) acknowledges,
“place-based education can be distinguished from much conventional environmental
education by the attention its practitioners direct toward both social and natural
environments.” Places, as social and natural environments, are settings beyond the
classroom door that form an integrating context for a variety of subject-matter.

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In Dewey’s terms, place-based education could be considered the most recent

version of the ‘new education.’ As such, it is likely in the early stages of the
reform cycles Meyers (1910) identified and we have been describing as occurring
throughout the 20th century. Gruenewald (2005, p. 274) made a similar point: “as a
relatively recent phenomenon, place-based or place-conscious education has not yet
subjected itself to the gaze of governmentality to the extent witnessed in current EE
[environmental education] discourse.” In other words, “place-based education …
has not yet been widely institutionalised” (p. 263). Place-based educators might look
to nature-study to consider the possibility of a future Gruenewald points to. With
nature-study there had been “a recognition of the fact that children are instinctively
interested in their nature environment; that their reactions to these interests exert on
them a strong growth influence – physically, mentally, spiritually” (Meyers, 1910,
p. 212). What followed from this recognition was the desire among curriculum
experts “to utilize this interest” (p. 212). In the next stage of the cycle, knowledge
might be “systematized” (p. 212), subject matter developed as an assessable body of
knowledge that defines the study of place and places.
As Gruenewald (2003b, p. 621) possibly foretells, “where place-conscious
traditions continue, they will be under constant pressure to prove their worth by
conventional measures in national, state, and local systems of education.”3 Educators
might further predict that an emerging emphasis on subject-matter may bring place-
based education more and more indoors, where it will be subject to the trappings of
traditional school. Then a new effort would emerge at some point, designed to fill the
gap created by the institutionalization of place-based education, which would again
aspire to reach the student-centered ideals of progressive education. Under these
conditions, place-based education would itself not disappear but would become yet
another contributor to the crowded curriculum.

SUMMARY

Throughout the 20th century, outdoor education as a pedagogical approach enjoyed

periods of success as well as struggle. These periods followed a discernable pattern;
just as the early nature-study had become botany and the so-called ‘fads and frills’
such as camping education were superadded to a fixed system of schooling, the
various cycles of reform reproduced the underlying dualism of method and
subject-matter, and what resulted was crowding in the curriculum rather than a
fundamental re-imagining of education as a cultural institution. Outdoor education
has thus refracted over a century into an increasing array of different hybrids.
As stated in the introduction, such proliferation prompted Knapp (1997, p. 4) to
compile “a list of more than 50 terms that fit under the umbrella describing our
field.”
… earth education, ecological education, energy education, expeditionary
learning, environmental and environment education, adventure and challenge

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education, outdoor ethics education, bioregional education, science-technology-

society education, global environmental change education, and sustainable
development education. Just look in any professional conference program for
some of these terms and for the variety of activities offered. (Knapp, 1997, p. 4)
Knapp’s recognition of the crowded curriculum indicates the deeper issue we
have been trying to illustrate. As Kraft (1985, p. 8) pointed out, “one of the major
problems of the experiential education movement has been its inability to agree
upon a definition. This makes the task of finding the philosophical, psychological
and other underpinnings of the emerging discipline that much more difficult.” Kraft
(p. 8) identified what he believed was “perhaps the broadest possible definition” of
experiential education in the writings of Morris Keeton, Executive Director of the
Cooperative Assessment of Experiential Learning, who called it “that which ‘occurs
outside of classrooms’ (Keeton, 1976, p. 5).” Astute readers will detect a restatement
of outdoor education as it was originally pitted against classroom-based education
nearly a century before. This recurrent history suggests the cycles of reform will
continue, leading to ever more crowding in the curriculum rather than a fundamental
transformation of what outdoor education might mean in the context of schooling.

NOTES
1
This book, published in Australia, is a close adaptation of Lucas’s (1972) PhD thesis gained at Ohio
State University.
2
Conservation education was a precursor to environmental education that “focused on assisting both
youth and adults in understanding more fully the characteristics, distribution, status, uses, problems,
and policies regarding natural resources” (Stapp, 1974, p. 46). It signals how a sense of ‘for the
environment’ (conservation) could be understood as primarily concerned with subject matter.
3
Jennings, Swidler and Koliba (2005, p. 62) queried “the relationship between standards-based
reforms and place-based education” in Vermont, where two place-based standards were developed
and incorporated into the already existing curriculum standards framework. Their research “suggested
that the conflict between standards and place-based curriculum may be more rhetorical than real”
(p. 63). They (p. 62) also pointed out that these place-based standards were “not embedded in the part
of the frameworks – the fields of knowledge – that are currently being assessed,” and this reduced the
emphasis on specific content. But this situation was beginning to change. “Vermont policy makers
are considering designing assessments for the Vital Results section of the frameworks,” they (p. 62)
acknowledged, right where the place-based standards were situated.

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MOVING PAST THE CONFUSION:

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

A PROBLEM OF EDUCATION, NOT JUST OUTDOOR EDUCATION

We began this book by asking ‘What is outdoor education?’ and have attempted
to show how this seemingly trivial (although fraught) question points to a deep
and abiding problem with institutionalized schooling, rather than suggesting a tidy
new version of reforms that provide specific solutions to problems with ‘indoor’
education. Throughout the book we have invoked specific points from Dewey’s
work, and our discussion of solutions will turn to him more directly. We are also
borrowing from Dewey in our approach to offering solutions; he understood that
before one can propose solutions, some basic agreement is needed on the problem.
For “to see the problem another sees, in the same perspective and at the same angle –
that amounts to something. Agreement in solutions is in comparison perfunctory”
(1906, p. 129). The recurrent debates about method and subject matter in outdoor
education suggest that there is not yet common agreement on the problem – which,
according to Dewey, really stems from evasion of the question: ‘What is education?’
While we’d like to think our last two chapters are more than ‘perfunctory,’ we keep
our focus at a level deeper than specific prescriptions.
Up to now, we have argued that outdoor education’s ‘basic problem’ is underlying
confusion which manifests itself in ongoing debates about the centrality of method
versus subject matter, a problem that is especially apparent once one recognizes cyclic
patterns of reform over more than a century. Notably, this problem situates outdoor
education within debates and discourses relevant to education more broadly. Chapters
two to four outlined how competing priorities were advanced in the face of perceptions
of the failure of schools to engage children on the one hand, and impart to them
important academic content on the other hand. We described how outdoor education
reforms have vacillated from one of these poles to the other and back again. We also
highlighted some of the reformers who tried to deal explicitly with these issues –
some arguing strongly for prioritizing method, others for subject matter, and still
others trying to rise above the fray and resolve the conflicts between them. In spite
of these efforts, deep conflicts have persisted, as outdoor education’s relationship to
schooling remains as fractured and tenuous as ever.
We hope we have convinced readers to perceive outdoor education’s history as
we do: first, as a series of important reform movements that addressed serious and
evolving environmental, social, and psychological issues; and second, as emblematic
of deeper issues in education that invariably result in its marginalization and/or joining

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an already crowded curriculum. For we believe it is important to understand that

confusion is not characteristic of outdoor education alone, but rather is a longstanding
feature of institutionalized education more generally. Until underlying confusion is
addressed, such will be the plight of most reforms. As Dewey (1938) expressed, with
some exasperation, in the final paragraph of his small but powerful book Experience
and Education, the conflict between new and old education, progressive and
traditional education, method and subject matter, child and curriculum, should not
be accepted as somehow fundamental and basic. Instead educators must continue to
pursue this problem to a deeper level, to finding out what education is.
I have used frequently in what precedes the words “progressive” and “new”
education. I do not wish to close, however, without recording my firm belief
that the fundamental issue is not of new versus old education nor of progressive
against traditional education but a question of what anything whatever must be
to be worthy of the name education…. The basic question concerns the nature
of education with no qualifying adjectives prefixed. What we want and need is
education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when
we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions
have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or
a slogan. (Dewey, 1938, pp. 90–91)
We are sympathetic to Dewey’s appeal and also hope for an educational future that
requires no ‘qualifying adjectives’ prefixed to education, even that of outdoor. To
propose such a future, we will try and inhabit Dewey’s imagination in the above
passage when he argues that teachers and others have been fundamentally confused
about what education is.

UNDERSTANDING EDUCATION AS EXPERIENCE

In the preface of Experience and Education, Dewey (1938, p. 5) argues that “it
is the business of an intelligent theory of education to ascertain the causes for the
conflicts that exist.” (Like Dewey, we have proposed that many conflicts have their
origins in dichotomous ways of thinking about method and subject matter, child and
curriculum.) But “instead of taking one side or the other,” this intelligent theory should
“indicate a plan of operations proceeding from a level deeper and more inclusive than
is represented by the practices and ideas of the contending parties” (p. 5). Going to
this deeper level, however, does not mean attempting “to bring about a compromise
between opposed schools of thought, to find a via media, nor yet make an eclectic
combination of points picked out hither and yon from all schools” (p. 5). In other
words, innovative solutions cannot be achieved merely by selecting the most attractive
parts of competing theories; a new and comprehensive approach is required. Dewey
attempted such an approach by using his vast concept of experience, to which we now
turn. A note to readers: we will need to go afield of outdoor education for a time to lay
some new groundwork in this area before we can situate it again as part of schooling.

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In order to get beyond the compromises and hybrids that have characterized
education reforms for a century, including outdoor education, it is necessary to
understand how method and subject matter invariably work together in a unified
way rather than simply considering them as separate and thus in conflict. To achieve
this it will be instructive to return to Dewey’s core idea “that there is an intimate and
necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education” (1938,
p. 20). In other words, there is no need to make education ‘more experiential’; in
fact, this orientation reflects a misunderstanding of experience and is already off on
the wrong foot. But how then, did Dewey want educationists to approach their field,
equipped with a notion of experience?
We’ll approach this question in three steps over the next two chapters. First, in this
chapter, we discuss how Dewey broke down the thinking/doing dualism that underlies
the subject matter/method dichotomy. We’ll explain how Dewey’s theory has been
approached wrongly particularly by the most recent wave of outdoor education
reforms, what Hammerman (1980) called the period of experiential education. We
introduce an important aspect of Dewey’s theory that has been largely overlooked,
the relationship between reflective and aesthetic experience, and show how, even in
reflective experience, Dewey argued against a doing/thinking dichotomy. Second,
we’ll discuss how Dewey situated his theory in recent human history, particularly
as large-scale social institutions were established and specially designed to promote
‘learning.’ This historical overview is important to understanding how Dewey saw
the fundamental relationship between doing and learning in experience and why he
argued that reformers made critical errors that doomed both their child-centered and
subject area projects. Finally, in the next chapter, we describe the educational program
Dewey developed on the back of these ideas, in which experience and education
were unified. A core part of Dewey’s program is the concept of occupations. We
conclude the book by imagining outdoor education not as a method or a subject
area, but as a series of occupations that would indispensably shape any education
that could be considered worthwhile. Such occupations meaningfully incorporate
method and subject matter, providing that deeper level which gets beneath the
problem and opens up an area of discourse in outdoor education and education more
generally that is easily overlooked.
Reflecting on ‘reflection.’ The predominant way of organizing outdoor education
during its most recent period has been to emphasize connections between experience
and reflection. This emphasis is often attributed to Dewey, apparently stemming
from a reading of his short book Experience and Education (Miettinen, 2000). For
example, one popular adventure education textbook refers to it when claiming that
Dewey was the first to highlight the “cyclical nature” of a “three-step process”
concerned with the relationship between experience and education (Priest & Gass,
1997, p. 144). In his original text, Dewey described this process in the following way:

(1) observation of surrounding conditions; (2) knowledge of what has

happened in similar situations in the past, a knowledge obtained partly by

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recollection and partly from the information, advice, and warning of those
who have had a wider experience; and (3) judgment which puts together
what is observed and what is recalled to see what they signify. (Dewey, 1938,
pp. 68–69)

In approaching this process, Dewey (1938, p. 69) emphasizes the educational

importance of “procuring the postponement of immediate action upon desire until
observation and judgment have intervened.” This sentiment, along with other
elements of Dewey’s writing, has largely been interpreted to mean that “reflection”
should follow “experience” as two steps in a sequence (Wurdinger & Paxton, 2003).
This ‘learning sequence’ has become axiomatic in the literature. In one popular 1985
book on reflection, for instance, David Boud, Rosemary Keough, and David Walker
proclaimed that “experience alone is not the key to learning” (p. 7). As stated earlier,
Laura Joplin (1981) argued for a similar idea in her spiral-like model of experience,
writing that “experience alone is insufficient to be called experiential education,
and it is the reflection process which turns experience into experiential education”
(p. 17). Instead of being seen as a form of experience itself, reflection came to be
treated as some other kind of cognitive phenomenon occurring “in the privacy of
one’s own head” (Horwood, 1989). This experience-reflect sequence became firmly
cemented in David Kolb’s highly influential book Experiential Learning: Experience
as the Source of Learning and Development (1985), which effectively canonized the
‘experiential learning cycle’ as the dominant model underpinning much of outdoor
education (Seaman, 2008).
But here we would like to highlight a crucial point that problematizes some of this
thinking on experiential learning. Dewey focused throughout his writing on reflection
not as a thing in itself, not as a step in the learning process after experience, but as
one mode of experience. He called this mode “reflective experience” (1916a, p. 177).
As an advocate of scientific method, he of course emphasized the significance of
careful, systematic thinking to modern education and learning; the problem is that,
especially with the wide uptake of experiential learning cycles, experience per se
has come to be understood primarily as ‘doing,’ hence separable from – and usually
inferior to – reflection (see Michelson, 1999).
This is not Dewey’s position and it leads to an unfortunate misunderstanding
of his concept of experience, reducing it simply to a participatory exercise before
the all-important task of reflection; hence the common emphasis on method within
experiential reforms. For Dewey – a staunch pragmatist – there is no way to escape
experience in order to reflect on it (seemingly from a non-experiential position sitting
outside the original experience). Thus, to stop what Wichmann (1980) called the
“process-centered syndrome,” or the preoccupation with method that experiential
learning models have tended to propagate, it is necessary to address what Dewey
meant by reflective experience and its relationship to another mode of experience:
aesthetic experience. For Dewey, awareness of how these two modes of experience
operate, and what each one’s role is with respect to learning, was to be the starting

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point for a unified theory of education. It is also instructive as to the potential role of
outdoor education in a broader vision for schooling.

EXPERIENCE AS REFLECTIVE AND AESTHETIC

Across various texts, Dewey expends substantial effort communicating the

importance of reflective experience, a phrase implying that reflection is experience.
Reflective experience is both a common process everyone goes through on a routine
basis, and an important way of being that can be cultivated to yield new personal
and social knowledge – or, more precisely, to advance a scientific outlook on a
constantly evolving world.
Two forms of reflective experience are basic to how people approach their lives.
The first, what Dewey calls “the method of trial and error” (1916a, p. 169), involves
proportionately less deliberate thinking, while the second involves more intentional,
focused mental effort. In the first, firsthand activity dominates thinking, while in the
second, cognitive activity dominates and controls how one approaches a problem or
task. In trial and error, “we simply do something and when it fails, we do something
else, and keep on trying until we hit upon something which works” (pp. 169–170).
The incidental reflection that naturally occurs during this process enables us to see
“that a certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not
see how they are” (p. 170). The trial and error method is thus reflective experience
in one sense, involving a basic level of thought, but in this mode one is thoroughly
preoccupied with ‘doing.’ Importantly, Dewey was not disparaging the trial-and-
error process here but merely specifying an aspect of how we deal with many routine
problems we encounter on an everyday basis. Imagine if you had to pause and
contemplate the reasoning behind your action each time you needed to solve a minor
problem, how laborious life would be!
The second type of reflective experience is distinguished from trial and error
by containing proportionately more analytic thought and is the type of reflective
experience that is usually considered reflection per se. In this mode, it can be said
that thinking dominates firsthand activity by making it an object of thought. This
more analytic type is easiest to discern through a more comprehensive description of
“the general features of reflective experience” that Dewey (1916a, p. 176) provides
in Democracy and Education. These general features are:

(i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in
an incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a
conjectural anticipation – a tentative interpretation of the given elements,
attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences; (iii) a careful
survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable
consideration which will define and clarify the problem in hand; (iv) a
consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and
more consistent, because squaring with a wider range of facts; (v) taking one

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stand upon the projected hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the
existing state of affairs: doing something overtly to bring about the anticipated
result, and thereby testing the hypothesis. (Dewey, 1916a, p. 176)

While these five features seem to present a simplistic cycle, Dewey was actually
offering a deeper framework in which to relate the two types of reflective experience.
In this account, the trial and error method (involving parts ii and v) includes more
“incidental reflection” (1929a, p. 6), the other (iii and iv) being a more “regulated
reflective inquiry” (p. 7). Dewey (1916a, p. 176, italics in original) acknowledges
this distinction when he claims that “it is the extent and accuracy” of the features
emphasized at “three and four [iii and iv] which mark off a distinctive reflective
experience from one on the trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an
experience.” In other words, thinking is distinguished from other activities only by
deliberately emphasizing points iii and iv above – consciously working to define the
problem at hand and develop hypothetical solutions. Crucially, this is experience of
a certain kind – it is not something that comes after experience, but is rather a form
of practical activity in its own right.
This does not mean diligent problem solving doesn’t occur in trial and error.
There, thinking involves “a conjectural anticipation – a tentative interpretation of
the given elements, attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences,”
combined with “taking one stand upon the projected hypothesis as a plan of action
which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing something overtly to bring
about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the hypothesis” (Dewey, 1916a,
p. 176). The emphasis is not on abstract reflection, but on thinking within the
concrete elements of the situation. We want to keep doing what we were doing
(method) without having to really stop and think, so we only put minimal effort into
thought. This means that if our first plan of action doesn’t work – if it was pursued
in error – we quickly shift gears and try another option until something works.
Conversely, the second, more analytic mode of reflective experience would make
the problem and our way of thinking about it an object of thought (subject matter),
changing the character of the situation into one less preoccupied with doing and
more dominated by thinking. At no point, though, do we become disconnected from
experience.
Our point here is to show that action and reflection are not opposed but can
be encapsulated in one of the modes of experience Dewey described: reflective
experience. It is an error to separate out ‘experience’ from ‘reflection’ as two
distinct phenomena. In fact, Dewey identified this as the root of the method/subject
matter confusion: “reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what
we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing – the how” (1916a, p. 196).
And “when we give names to this distinction we have subject matter and method as
our terms” (p. 196). But this distinction is not a division; it is not dualistic. Instead,
both are aspects of a unified reality, present in all forms of experience from the most
authoritarian classroom situation to the most gleeful outdoor excursion, from an

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engrossing hands-on task to a moment of private circumspection. In this conceptual

framework, method and subject matter are always unified in ‘real time’ human
experience, and one can tease them apart only for academic purposes.
For Dewey, there is nothing that could be called ‘merely doing’ and another that
could be called ‘purely thinking,’ as if they are separable. In all experience, doing
and thinking are what philosophers call dialectically related: doing one necessarily
involves and transforms the other. As Dewey wrote, “we never get wholly beyond the
trial and error situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be
tried in the world and thereby tried out” (1916a, p. 177). Even regulated reflection –
the most ‘abstract’ form – cannot be disconnected from whatever problem is at hand.
Practical problems frame reflective activity, and any hypotheses formulated in the
mind must be subjected to trial and error in practice. It is therefore pointless to
pit ‘experience’ and ‘reflection’ against one another, position them in any kind of
sequence, or proclaim the alignment of ‘method’ to one and ‘subject matter’ to the
other.
Dewey was also acutely aware of the cognitive bias that could arise if one overly
valued and emphasized reflective experience – especially in its more focused,
abstract form – as educators tend to do. As we pointed out, reflective experience
always involves the interplay between trial and error and analytic reflection, even
though one of these might predominate at any given time. But, if we took this kind of
mental activity to be the entirety of experience and attempted to extrapolate a theory
of curriculum from it, we would end up with a barren educational landscape (where,
probably, battles between method and subject matter would rage!). To overcome this
bias, one needs to turn to a key feature within Dewey’s theory that we have not yet
touched on significantly: aesthetic experience. To approach this mode of experience,
we will carefully back our way out of reflective experience, as aesthetic experience
is a very different mode of experience. Importantly, however, both are modes of
experience: they are inherently connected.
Dewey (1916a, p. 176) argues that the origin of issues on which to reflect – problems
that trigger reflective experience, in other words – is found in “perplexity, confusion,
doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an incomplete situation whose full
character is not yet determined.” Elsewhere he argues: “all reflective inquiry starts
from a problematic situation” (1929b, p. 189). If “no problem or difficulty in the
quality of the experience has presented itself to provoke reflection,” then “inquiry
does not take place at all” (1903, p. 11). Here Dewey is pointing to the crucial role
played by emotion and feeling in generating doubt, and its resolution, knowing (or, in
pragmatic terms, warrantability). In a further account of reflective experience, in the
second edition of How We Think, he points out that “the two limits of every unit of
[reflective] thinking are a perplexed, troubled or confused situation at the beginning
and a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation at the close” (1933, p. 106). He labels
the beginning situation as pre-reflective and the resolved situation as post-reflective.
Thus a “pre-reflective” situation “sets the problem to be solved; out of it grows the
question that reflection has to answer” (pp. 106–107). And when “the doubt has

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been dispelled,” then “the situation is post-reflective” (p. 107). The post-reflective
situation involves “a direct experience of mastery, satisfaction, enjoyment” (p. 107).
What Dewey is explaining here is that reflective experience occupies only part of
our existence and that emotions – usually considered as the affective domain –
act as a ‘pivot’ into reflective experience. But what is going on outside of reflective
experience?
Dewey’s pre-reflective and post-reflective categorizations point to reflective
experience as emerging from and returning to a different mode of experience which
is “non-reflective” in nature (1916b, p. 137fn). For Dewey, reflective experience is
analogous to cognitive experience, and “cognitive experience must originate within
that of a non-cognitive [non-reflective] sort” (1929b, p. 23). This is not to separate
thinking from doing as ‘experiential learning cycles’ seem to have done; sadly, we
fear that Dewey’s choice of ‘non-cognitive’ as a descriptor has taken on a pejorative
meaning in educational circles. He seemed to be aware of the potential for bias even
in his own description:
A typical illustration of what I mean by such non-cognitive experiences is
found in my not infrequent statements to the effect that the assumption of the
ubiquity of cognitive experience inevitably results in disparagement of things
experienced by way of love, desire, hope, fear and other traits characteristic of
human individuality. (Dewey, 1939, p. 548)
It is easy to mistake Dewey’s discussions about cognitive and non-cognitive
experience to mean that educators should create designs that emphasize reflection
over non-cognitive or ‘mere’ doing. But Dewey moved beneath this debate with
his work on what he called aesthetic experience, which is non-reflective in the
sense that it describes our immediate feeling of a situation. We only apply labels
to this immediate emotional sense – like love, desire, hope, and fear – in retrospect
(reflectively). As Dewey (1934a, p. 42) explains, “experience is emotional but there
are no separate things called emotions in it.” When understood in this integrative
way “emotion is the moving and cementing force” (p. 42) in experience. “It selects
what is congruous and dyes what is selected with its color, thereby giving qualitative
unity to materials externally disparate and dissimilar. It thus provides unity in and
through the varied parts of an experience” (p. 42). Through his description of non-
cognitive, emotion-laden experience, he arrives at his pivotal concept: “when the
unity is of the sort already described, the experience has aesthetic character” (p. 42).1
Again, it is important to remember that Dewey’s overriding theoretical aim was
to express “the idea that there is an intimate and necessary relation between the
processes of actual experience and education” (1938, p. 20). He was not arguing
prescriptively that educators should insert more love, more desire, more hope, or
more fear into their curriculum or classroom, or focus more on emotions and less
on thinking. He was arguing that philosophers of education needed to recognize the
significance of emotion in all human experience, including those that take place in
situations we call ‘educational’ where ‘knowing’ is an ultimate goal. In recognizing

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the role emotion plays in thinking, the barren educational landscape would begin to
have some color, texture, and climate – to approximate human experience in other
domains; in other words, something schools notoriously failed to do.
Moreover, Dewey was careful to note that it wasn’t as if schools were places
where aesthetic experience didn’t happen – it was just that teachers weren’t generally
concerned with the aesthetic experience of young people, so the aesthetic experience
they helped create for children in school was often demotivating, coercive, and
de-humanizing – emotionally negative – seemingly to forward the purpose of
learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education:
… the general pattern of school organization (by which I mean the relation
of pupils to one another and to the teachers) constitutes the school as a
kind of institution sharply marked off from other social institutions. Call
up in imagination the ordinary school-room, its time-schedules, schemes of
classification, of examination and promotion, of rules of order, and I think you
will grasp what is meant by ‘pattern of organization.’ If then you contrast this
with what goes on in the family, for example, you will appreciate what is meant
by the school being a kind of institution sharply marked off from any other
form of social organization. (1938, pp. 17–18)
Dewey wanted philosophers and educators to recognize that all of our experience
in the world is aesthetic in nature, with people occasionally needing to switch into
one or the other reflective mode when they perceive a “breakdown” in the flow
of events (Koschmann, Kuutti & Hickman, 1998). Thus even reflective experience
has its aesthetic qualities. “Esthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual
experience since the latter must bear an esthetic stamp to be itself complete” (Dewey,
1934a, p. 38). Curriculum theorists and school designers made one or more of several
key mistakes related to this reality: (1) treating aesthetic experience as inferior to
reflective experience when it comes to learning; (2) assuming it was unimportant
in or could be programmed out of schooling; or (3) denying its existence at all by
focusing exclusively on subject matter in the abstract, and making this the basis
for how schools are organized. Conversely, Dewey was critical of progressives
who made too much of children’s emotions as if they could be understood apart
from the substance of subject matter. Progressives were guilty of making “the
child’s present powers and interests as something finally significant in themselves”
(1902b, p. 15). “Interests in reality,” he wrote, “are but attitudes toward possible
experiences; they are not achievements; their worth is in the leverage they afford, not
in the accomplishment they represent” (p. 15). His challenge to educators was both
to design situations with rich and meaningful emotional possibilities and to interpret
children’s interests as steps in the development of social attitudes and mastery of
cultural knowledge.
Dewey advanced aesthetic experience as a key aspect of this project, seeing it
as central to human life as it unfolds in real time and as the instigator to cultural
innovation and growth. And in a typically non-dualistic way, Dewey identified a

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form of thinking that acknowledged aesthetic experience: what he called “affective

thought” (1926, p. 3), or “qualitative thought” (1930, p. 18). This type of thinking can
be understood as a kind of intuitive awareness of what is going on in an immediate
sense – a ‘feel for the game’ one might say, or to borrow William Hanks’s more
technical phrasing, “a prereflective grasp of complex situations” involving masterful
“timing of actions relative to changing circumstances: the ability to improvise”
(Hanks, 1991, p. 20). Affective thought is distinct from more analytical reflection,
which goes out of its way to isolate elements of a situation for close scrutiny in order
to solve specific problems as they arise, or to categorize things in retrospect. In this
sense aesthetic experience ‘grounds’ reflective experience; aesthetic experience is
the earth from which reflective experience grows and continues to be rooted.
So aesthetic and reflective forms of thinking are both ongoing and necessary.
Thus, rather than being the poor stepchild to reflective experience, disparaged for
its inability to contribute much to learning, it is “to aesthetic experience” that “the
philosopher must go to understand what experience is,” Dewey (1934a, p. 274)
claimed. By extension, any comprehensive – that is, non-confused – proposals for
education must conceptualize the inherent relationship between the reflective and
aesthetic modes of experience without arranging them in a hierarchy or a sequence.
This would forever split apart doing, thinking, and feeling, and would be the
perpetual source of confusion.
To further substantiate his claims, Dewey identified the historical origins of this
tendency, a line of analysis that also laid a foundation for his radical conception of
education. Here we take the reader through Dewey’s observations about learning
and schooling that reveal the historical roots of this separation of reflection from
experience, and in turn offer a deeper understanding of his proposed way forward.

THE PROBLEM AND PROMISE OF LEARNING ‘AS SUCH’

In his My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey wrote: “I believe that all education proceeds by
the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the [community]”
(1897a, p. 77).2 Notice Dewey did not say ‘all education proceeds by learning
about the social consciousness of the community,’ as if he imagined a generation of
hardworking Latin or civics students. He also did not say ‘the best type of education
occurs when people participate in the social consciousness of the community,’ as if
he was promoting ‘experiential’ over didactic teaching. Instead, he was advancing
a basic existential fact: all education occurs through participation in historically
formed, socially organized activities. What did he mean by this?
It will be useful to approach Dewey’s position by revisiting his account of
the somewhat haphazard rise of a familiar institution: schooling. Education as
institutionalized mass schooling was only a relatively recent cultural invention in
Dewey’s day, and was, in his thinking, a largely ineffective form of participation in
social consciousness. In a lecture titled Waste in Education, Dewey wrote: “from
the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to

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utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within
the school itself” (1900, p. 89). He tells a story in a related essay, The School and the
Life of the Child, of trying to find desks to equip his Chicago lab school. Running out
of luck, he finally happens upon a shopkeeper who keenly observes, “I am afraid we
have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work; these
are all for listening” (p. 48). Dewey reflects on what this shopkeeper says:

If we put before the minds eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly
desks placed in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as
little moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just
enough space to hold books, pencils, and paper, we can reconstruct the only
educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. (p. 48)

To identify more effective ways of educating than what is afforded in ‘the ordinary
schoolroom,’ Dewey looked for historical analogues. He concluded that individuals
throughout human history had mainly been ‘educated’ through direct involvement
in the activities and traditions comprising community life, and only sporadically
through formal instruction. Furthermore, education historically followed class lines;
for most people it was ‘informal,’ a situation in which “subject matter is carried
directly in the matrix of social intercourse. It is what the persons with whom an
individual associates do and say” (Dewey, 1916a, p. 212). Most people throughout
history did not participate in cultural activities in order to learn, they learned in
order to participate more fully in cultural activities. For most, a specialized system
of schooling such as the one Dewey describes above would have been an unwelcome
distraction from meaningful participation in ordinary family, community, economic,
and social life.
Dewey recognized that this fact could be grasped by looking back only a short
time in the history of family, community, economic and social conduct. Here he is
worth quoting at length:

[Before] the factory system lies the household and neighborhood system.
Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most three
generations, to find a time when the household was practically the center in
which were carried on, or about which were clustered, all the typical forms
of industrial occupation. The clothing worn was for the most part made in
the house; the members of the household were usually familiar also with the
shearing of the sheep, the carding and spinning of the wool, and the plying
of the loom. Instead of pressing a button and flooding the house with electric
light, the whole process of getting illumination was followed in its toilsome
length from the killing of the animal and the trying of fat to the making of
wicks and dipping of candles. The supply of flour, of lumber, of foods, of
building materials, of household furniture, even of metal ware, of nails,
hinges, hammers, etc., was produced in the immediate neighborhood, in shops
which were constantly open to inspection and often centers of congregation.

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The entire industrial process stood revealed, from the production on the farm of
the raw materials till the finished article was actually put to use. Not only this,
but practically every member of the household had his own share in the work.
The children, as they gained in strength and capacity, were gradually initiated
into the mysteries of the several processes. It was a matter of immediate and
personal concern, even to the point of actual participation. … In all this there
was continual training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination,
of logical thought, and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand
contact with actualities. The educative forces of the domestic spinning and
weaving, of the sawmill, the gristmill, the cooper shop, and the blacksmith
forge, were continuously operative. (Dewey, 1899, p. 457)
Here Dewey is not sentimentally bemoaning the loss of rural simplicity, but rather
describing how most education in pre-industrial times was one and the same as
learning and developing through firsthand participation in communal life; it was
not set apart from that life the way school is, and it did not emphasize learning
as a special activity one needed to practice on its own. All the necessary mental
operations and dispositions were cultivated through participation. The organizing
principles of education under those conditions were none other than carrying out
everyday routines in pursuit of goals shared by mature members of the community.
In other words, there was no ‘curriculum’ requiring special child-centered methods
or an infusion of subject matter – only the shared labor of jointly pursuing family,
neighbourhood, or workplace goals.
What was important for children to learn under these conditions ‘stood revealed’
and did not require focused instruction by an expert to interpret. As children ‘grew
in strength and capacity,’ that is, as they developed the ability to contribute in
increasingly valuable ways, they were ‘gradually initiated’ into new responsibilities
and new roles. The test of learning lay in one’s ability to meet these responsibilities
and help make life run smoothly. So sequestering children in separate buildings with
same-age peers made little sense, as there they neither learned from mature members
of the community nor contributed to the community’s overall wellbeing by sharing
in its work.
Such was mass education before the ‘factory system,’ and much of what people
needed to learn happened in that informal fashion. There were, however, certain
aspects of community life that needed direct instruction since they were less
explicitly revealed in everyday routines. Based on his observation of the routines
that existed within informal education as described above, Dewey extrapolated to
formal educational activities:
This fact [that most education happened informally] gives a clew to the
understanding of the subject matter of formal or deliberate instruction. A
connecting link is found in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which
accompany the doings and rites of a[n indigenous] social group.2 They
represent the stock of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous

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experience, which are so prized by the group as to be identified with their

conception of their own collective line…. Even more pains are consciously
taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal formulae of the
group than to transmit the directly useful customs of the group just because
they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in the ordinary processes of
association. (Dewey, 1916a, pp. 212–213)

What Dewey is saying here is that only certain aspects of culture were subject to
separate processes of ‘learning.’ Directly useful customs – or, in today’s language,
what children need to know and be able to do – could be ‘picked up’ through
‘ordinary processes of association.’ The expansion of commerce in the 16th century,
for instance, which gave rise to primary schooling, required that more people learn
to ‘read, write, and compute.’ But still “the aim was distinctly a practical one; it was
utility, getting command of these tools, the symbols of learning, not for the sake of
learning, but because they gave access to careers in life otherwise closed” (Dewey,
1900, p. 82, emphasis added). Even when people learned these new operations in
a formal setting, learning still happened in the service of practical goals, not for its
own sake.
Certain other aspects of communal life that did require focused instruction
were not immanently useful to most people, and their acquisition was typically a
function of both occupation and social class. What may be called high culture was
a particular area ‘worthy of taking conscious pains to perpetuate’ where ‘myths,
legends, and sacred verbal formulae’ were deemed to require focused instruction
of some form. Moreover, not everyone needed intimate acquaintance with these
traditions; religious authorities, for example, were the only ones who really required
a deep understanding of rites and rituals in order to perform their social roles and
maintain their power. Such high status knowledge was therefore both specialized and
limited to a class of the population trained to operate in the realm of ‘theory.’ Only
those chiefly responsible for managing symbolic and high status knowledge had to
engage, in Dewey’s terms, in specialized “training for the profession of learning”
(1899, p. 466) – that is, in systematic, formal instruction.
Again, Dewey was not sentimentalizing this educational arrangement nor was he
glorifying one or the other class of persons engaged in ‘informal’ versus ‘formal’
education. He was using historical analysis to point out some of the key forces
shaping modern conceptions of education in the industrial era. This line of analysis
revealed several important insights. For one, he showed that the way learning occurs
culturally aligns with the overall societal division of labor, as well as the material
aspects of people’s existence. In pre-industrial times, there was little geographical
mobility or movement between social classes; it would have made little sense for
people to train for things that didn’t help them pursue their practical goals since they
probably couldn’t surpass their social standing anyways. For another, he argued that
mental operations did not develop in a vacuum but in the carrying out of one’s job
and according to one’s evolving social roles. For most, this meant manual work,

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while for a select few it meant mental work; the historical fact was the same for
both, but, crucially, only the latter were preoccupied with the work of ‘learning.’ For
those who were educated ‘informally,’ learning served the goal of being productive
in practical areas; for those educated ‘formally,’ learning was the goal. Hence Dewey
called their activity “learning as such” (1900, p. 41, emphasis added).
The significance of Dewey’s insights here cannot be overstated, as he characterizes
learning as a socially organized activity and not only a psychological process.
Mastering abstract concepts for their own sake was hardly a widespread concern;
it was simply irrelevant to all but a few people. In pre-industrial times, and even
in the early 20th century, the activity of learning aligned with people’s life paths,
which were largely predetermined by social class and societal function. The idea that
everyone needed to learn because learning, in and of itself, is important did not yet
exist at any wide scale (if one wasn’t troubled by the prevailing social order, there
were no problems with learning at all!). Thus, in Dewey’s analysis, “the separation
of theory and practice” mapped precisely onto “the division into ‘cultured’ people
and ‘workers’” (1900, p. 42). Significantly for our discussion here, this also means
that formal education was the cultural institution that took learning as its exclusive
preoccupation, and with the advent of compulsory schooling came the expectation
that learning would become everybody’s main activity, whether it aligned with their
goals or not.
Enter Modern Times: Industrial-era Schooling. Dewey had skilfully shown that
learning as such was a historically evolved, practical human activity and not merely
a naturally occurring, psychological phenomenon; it especially was not a simple
matter of storing up abstract facts or developing critical thinking skills outside
of a specific setting. Education, then, was the cultural practice of organizing and
distributing opportunities to learn in order to reproduce or transform the division
of labor in society. In industrial society, this included helping people decide their
own individual paths since they were no longer bound to traditional forms of work.
Dewey, of course, saw in modern, mass education the potential to achieve political
democracy and individual flourishing to an unprecedented degree. But even this
potential did not emerge exclusively from the Enlightened minds of social reformers;
it too was a function of historical processes. Speaking of the habit of mind he referred
to as “experimental intelligence,” Dewey wrote (with John L. Childs):
… it cannot be established within education except as the activities of the latter
are founded on a clear idea of the active social forces of the day, of what they
are doing, of their effect, for good and harm, upon values, and except as this
idea and ideal are acted upon to direct experimentation in the currents of social
life that run outside the school and that condition the educational meaning of
whatever the school does. (1933, p. 319, emphasis in original)
For Dewey, education was not simply the process whereby individuals acquired
academic content or developed along their own unique paths: it was a social
institution that was uniquely able to advance political democracy, scientific progress,

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and individual possibilities. By the time he wrote Experience and Education in 1938,
however, the opportunity for education to serve as an agent of social planning was
losing ground to a destructive and unyielding form of capitalism. After witnessing
vast social problems firsthand in the Great Depression, Dewey understood the
power of capitalism to turn knowledge against democratic interests. Regarding “the
economic and social problems of present society” (1938, p. 80), he wrote:
They are products to a very large extent of the application of science in
production and distribution of commodities and services, while the latter
processes are the most important factor in determining the present relations of
human beings and social groups to one another. (1938, p. 80)
Four decades earlier Dewey had urged reformers to see education “as part and parcel
of the whole social evolution, and, in its more general features at least, as inevitable”
(1900, p. 21, emphasis added). He understood that the combination of industrial
capitalism and liberal democracy on a mass scale led naturally to the problem of how
to organize learning so as to harness innovation, manage rapidly changing conditions
across vast geographical distances, and prevent civilization from devolving into
some disastrous form of social Darwinism. Under these historical conditions it
was ‘inconceivable’ to him that education would not be fundamentally transformed
from earlier cultural models, and much to his chagrin in 1938, the school was still
approaching its role haphazardly and on the basis of mistaken thinking.
Like other social reformers of his day, Dewey was critical of aspects of capitalism
and saw education as a way to redirect its negative consequences – a fact that earned
him a reputation as a communist in some circles (see Dewey, 1934b). But unlike other
socially critical progressives, such as George Counts (1932), Dewey’s approach to
school reform was to not propose new curriculum content or instructional methods
but to focus on the cultural-historical nature of learning. Until people understood
learning for what it was – a form of practical activity that historically has followed
class lines – schools would be impotent to change society for the better or even to
fulfil their promise of individual flourishing. As he wrote in The School and Social
Progress:
At present, the impulses which lie at the basis of the industrial system are either
practically neglected or positively distorted during the school period. Until the
instincts of construction and production are systematically laid hold of in the
years of childhood and youth, until they are trained in social directions, enriched
by historical interpretation, controlled and illuminated by scientific methods,
we certainly are in no position even to locate the source of our economic evils,
much less to deal with them effectively. (Dewey, 1900, pp. 38–39)
Dewey recognized that the principal mistake of the schools was making the
“mediæval conception of learning” (1900, p. 41) – that is to say, formal instruction
serving a highly specific cultural function, involving a narrow group of individuals,
and devoted wholly to the mastery of abstract concepts – the model for “the

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‘New Education’” (p. 20). Schools were therefore woefully out of step with social
conditions as they evolved under industrial capitalism and political democracy.
Reformers had lost track of the historical context in which learning had expanded
and had become preoccupied with technical questions of subject matter, which drove
administration and methods of instruction. “This is the plane upon which it is too
customary to consider school changes” (p. 20), he wrote, frustrated by their failure to
understand learning as a fundamentally social and historical activity. “It is as rational
to conceive of the locomotive or telegraph as personal devices” (p. 20). On this, it is
again worth quoting Dewey at length:
If we go back a few centuries, we find a practical monopoly of learning. The term
possession of learning was, indeed, a happy one. Learning was a class matter.
This was a necessary result of social conditions. There were not in existence
any means by which the multitude could possibly have access to intellectual
resources. These were stored up and hidden away in manuscripts. Of these there
were at best only a few, and it required long and toilsome preparation to be able
to do anything with them. A high-priesthood of learning, which guarded the
treasury of truth and which doled it out to the masses under severe restrictions,
was the inevitable expression of these conditions. But, as a direct result of the
industrial revolution of which we have been speaking, this has been changed.
Printing was invented; it was made commercial. Books, magazines, papers
were multiplied and cheapened. As a result of the locomotive and telegraph,
frequent, rapid, and cheap intercommunication by mails and electricity was
called into being. Travel has been rendered easy; freedom of movement, with
its accompanying exchange of ideas, indefinitely facilitated. The result has
been an intellectual revolution. Learning has been put into circulation. While
there still is, and probably always will be, a particular class having the special
business of inquiry in hand, a distinctively learned class is henceforth out of
the question. It is an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid;
it has been liquefied. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.
(1900, pp. 39–40, most emphases added)
A positive feature of modern industrial capitalism, which Dewey acknowledged, is
that it had drastically changed people’s relationship to knowledge; it made becoming
a knowing person broadly available as a mode of living, with ‘learning as such’
a now-widespread activity that would enable growth in new directions. Thus the
democratic ideal for education was to facilitate participation in the activity of
learning as broadly and effectively as possible, opening up unprecedented pathways
for individual and societal development. Dewey’s eternal optimism in this regard
is what made him so staunchly committed to democracy. A main challenge was
therefore to construct institutions that engaged children in learning while still
respecting its foundation in human history and material society. Viewed in this way,
the method/subject matter debates that have dominated education for a century look
particularly myopic, and it is easy to see how Dewey became exasperated by them.

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Dewey never got the national conversation he wanted. Education – now entrenched
as factory-model schooling – was being most profoundly shaped on the one hand by
industrialists who wanted a flexible workforce, and on the other hand by traditional
educators who wanted to distribute the fixed body of knowledge they saw as most
important. By Dewey’s analysis, both failed to understand the cultural significance
of education and were therefore guilty of making ‘the medieval conception of
learning’ the design template for modern education. And, since reformers largely
used their same concepts to engage in the debate, they would never effect lasting
change.
The pernicious dualisms Dewey argued against were historical artefacts of ‘the
medieval conception of learning’ that had come to dominate modern educational
consciousness and school design. Hence Dewey’s insistence in 1938 on discovering
what education is. The various forms of outdoor education throughout the 20th century
have all, perhaps unwittingly, wrestled with but not solved this basic problem of what
education is, and they have thus formed an uneasy but steady relationship with the
‘medieval conception of learning,’ which has at its core the dualisms we’ve focused
on in this book.

KNOWING, DOING AND BEING

In the first section of this chapter, we explained Dewey’s idea of modes of experience,
including reflective and aesthetic experience. We also pointed out how educators tend
to possess a strongly favourable bias toward ‘cognitive’ experience – whether that be
of the trial and error (emphasizing doing) or more abstract (emphasizing knowing)
type – and against ‘non-cognitive’ experience, a false dichotomy Dewey was keen to
overcome by emphasizing the importance of aesthetic experience as non-reflective.
One way this goal can be approached is by reimagining the relationship between
knowing, doing and being. Here knowing and doing can be understood as analogous
to subject matter and method (as what and how in Dewey’s terms); these are the
two types of reflective experience. Non-reflective aesthetic experience, on the other
hand, is where we dwell – it is our life in an immediate and holistic emotional sense,
aptly described as the way we are being a person, then and there.
Given his historical understanding of learning as outlined above, it is possible to
see how Dewey took knowing to be a type of conduct, a form of practical human
activity, a way of being a person. By the time of his writing at the turn of the
20th century, more people had become engaged in this activity than ever before, and
education was positioned to expand participation even further – a prospect Dewey
relished because of its democratic potential. Seen this way, it is possible to extend
his conceptual framework and consider a knowing person to be a type of identity
(here we are engaging in a reflective appreciation of the aesthetic experience of
being a person in a certain way), one that has been most available among people
engaged specifically in what Dewey called ‘the profession of learning.’ Historically,
elites did the ‘knowing’ and everybody else did the ‘doing,’ but with mass

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education, this could potentially change. There is an important theoretical insight

here: one can see again through Dewey’s historical analysis that the doing/knowing
dichotomy is a false distinction; being a student in a modern school involves doing
knowing – or at least pretending to ‘do knowing.’ That is, modern education is
organized to help people participate (or perhaps exclude them from participation)
in the social activity of knowing, of being a knower, what used to be the province
of elites.
What does it take to be a knower? To be good at it, you need not only demonstrate
facility with abstract ideas, but adopt a favourable disposition to the cultural activity
of learning as such: to make it part of who you are. In schools, this kind of person is
highly regarded as an exemplary, motivated student. Outside of schools, Dewey was
quick to point out that being a knower occupies comparatively little time in people’s
lives compared to the various other ways of being. For professional know-ers, like
your humble authors, perhaps it occupies more time, life also consists of myriad
other ways of being a person.
This line of analysis is crucial for understanding Dewey’s philosophy, his designs
for education, and how it can be employed to approach some of the main problems
facing outdoor education and other reforms. It indicates that successful performance
in all human activities is not separate from knowing: ways of doing inherently
involve ways of knowing and vice-versa. Moreover, both are embedded within
a way of being a person. Thus reflective thinking focused on knowing cannot be
separated from that incidental reflection associated with continuing to do something,
and both are integral to being a person in a certain way, as lived aesthetically. So,
quite radically, Dewey’s analysis actually means there is no such thing as knowing
as a thing in itself. To be clear, Dewey is not disparaging the value of knowing as a
mode of human activity – in fact doing knowing responsibly and ethically in modern
society was an overriding concern of his – but that is how he wants us to think about
it: as a form of activity and one that contributes to other forms of activity – as a way
of doing things among the many ways of being a person.
Several dualisms dissolve through this line of analysis – outdoor/indoor, method/
subject matter, and doing/thinking. These dualisms revolve around the two types
of reflective experience, but dissolving them also requires an understanding of
the connection between reflective and aesthetic experience. This means that one
can only learn through participation in activity, through experience – understood
as knowing doing and being – reflective and aesthetic, both in their unity; there
simply is nothing else. So, the main question facing reformist outdoor educators
is not the either/or choice between ‘Is it a subject matter?’ or ‘Is it a method that is
preferable to indoor alternatives?’ Instead, this can be reconceived as an awareness
of how outdoor activities are not only ways of doing, but they are indeed also ways
of knowing – and even more than this, they are ways of being a person. The leading
question for outdoor educators, then, is: ‘what ways of being a person centrally
involve the outdoors, and what does it take to knowledgeably participate in these
activities?’

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This argument positions us to better understand what Dewey meant when he said,
in the opening line of My Pedagogic Creed (1897, p. 77), “all education proceeds by
participation in the social consciousness of the [community].” Or, in our phrasing,
all education occurs through participation in historically formed, socially organized
activities – including learning. Sadly, compulsory institutionalized schooling has
forced everyone to participate in and identify with the activity of learning, conducted
in a particularly narrow fashion, and whether or not it aligns with or informs their
other ways of being.
Let us elaborate by turning to curriculum for a moment. Knowing as a broadly
available type of activity is a relatively recent historical development (and, as an
aside, an increasingly important identity to achieve in a 21st century ‘information
based’ economy – see Wells & Claxton, 2002). Put in these terms, it becomes very
easy to see how it is that schools are preoccupied with getting people to be know-
ers. But schools make the terrible, paradoxical mistake of promoting the activity
of know-ing and the identity of the know-er while at the same time disparaging
the activity of do-ing and the identity of do-er – and therefore also ignoring, in the
aesthetic sense, other ways of be-ing a person (think of the social status of vocational
students in most high schools). Philosophically speaking, this is how the design of
most modern schools rests on a faulty premise – it artificially opposes knowing and
doing, and then bases even its most progressive reforms on one side or the other,
while seemingly ignoring being. This not only systematically produces disaffection
for many children, it also creates unresolvable curriculum design challenges that can
only result in crowding.
When the focus is on knowing as a thing in itself, a main problem for the school
is to decide on what is important to know and how to best organize this (subject
matter and its scope and sequence in the curriculum), and then how best to get
people to ‘internalize’ it (a matter of teaching methods, which come second) – all
with the ill directed aim of preparing students for ways of being that are outside the
realm of their experience. This invariably leads to disputes which focus primarily
on subject matter: about what content is most valuable, how it builds on other
content, how it relates to still more content, etc. Life is approached and ordered
as if it were a knowledge sequence to be learned in the monochrome manner of
being a student. Crucially, Dewey wanted educators to recognize how actual life
(or experience) is more about how we develop through encountering various ways
of being a person.
It is easy to see how such a focus on knowledge and knowing can quickly lead to
crowding, as well as the frustration that children’s interests and talents are constantly
ignored. Add to this the desire to promote do-ing, as progressives have always done –
including such activities as music, art, physical education, vocational training,
outdoor recreation, play, and so on – and you have on your hands a major volume
problem, especially as this ‘doing’ is mined for its subject matter and the area
of interest is argued for as a subject (as has been shown with nature-study and
outdoor education). Reforms can then only consist of supplanting existing areas or

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shrinking them so as to fit more of them in. Dewey described the problem in the
following way:

[The educational system] is more like a patchwork, and a patchwork whose

pieces do not form a pattern. It is a patchwork of the old and the new; of
unreconstructed survivals from the past and of things introduced because of
new conditions…. In consequence, the new studies that have been introduced
have split up the curriculum into unrelated parts and created congestion. There
are too many studies and too many courses of study, and the result is confusion.
(Dewey, 1935, p. 333)

Here we arrive at the crux of the matter, with a set of conceptual tools to better
understand it: the perpetual existence of ‘confusion’ stems from the faulty
preoccupation with knowing and doing as things-in-themselves, while simultaneously
ignoring and omitting concern for being; the consequence is its inevitable
organizational product the crowded curriculum. Based on this faulty premise, the
logic of schooling proceeds as follows:

There is a certain amount – a fixed quantity – of ready-made results and

accomplishments to be acquired by all children alike in a given time. It is
in response to this demand that the curriculum has been developed from the
elementary school up through the college. There is just so much desirable
knowledge, and there are just so many needed technical accomplishments in
the world. Then comes the mathematical problem of dividing this by the six,
twelve, or sixteen years of school life. Now give the children every year just
the appropriate fraction of the total, and by the time they have finished they
will have mastered the whole. (Dewey, 1900, p. 50)

If one approaches education as a matter of getting the right balance of knowing

and doing (see Coleman, 1995), the questions of ‘How to get more nature into the
schools?’ and ‘How to get kids outdoors?’ become important, a matter of values and
choices; if people valued nature more, then they’d drop other things and spend more
time on/in it. Or maybe they’d change how they’re teaching a subject area – say,
chemistry – so it can be done outside and not inside, and in a more engaging fashion.
This is how outdoor education has evolved and it reflects a fairly standard approach
to curriculum. It ultimately leaves all the dualisms intact, however, solving nothing
and making ‘outdoor education’ no more central to schooling than home economics
or algebra or the Scarlet Letter. This leads also to cycles of reform; it is just a matter
of time before the champion of outdoor education moves on, the outdoor center
becomes unaffordable, a new administrator with different values arrives and starts a
new program, or external trends progress to where ‘test prep’ has to take over space
in the curriculum. Of course, schools with ‘nature’ or ‘the outdoors’ or ‘ecology’
as part of their mission fare better than comprehensive schools, but do not resolve
the systemic issue. We believe these cycles of reform have been, at root, plagued

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with the dualistic thinking Dewey tried to overcome. Central to his solution was
the concept of occupations, importantly aligned with both aesthetic and reflective
experience – as being, doing and knowing – to which we now turn.

SUMMARY

In this chapter we have covered a lot of ground, both philosophical and historical –
though all, of course, to do with education and by implication outdoor education.
We began by highlighting how the conception, commonly held in experiential
learning circles, that experience and reflection, doing and thinking, are two different
types of things (one experience and one not) is an erroneous position. We have
shown this by going back to Dewey’s own work in this area. Here Dewey refers
to reflective experience as one mode of experience involving two types: type one
is comparatively less reflective, which accentuates getting on with doing things –
reflective thinking here is ‘incidental’ or ‘trial and error’ in that it grasps possible
solutions without necessarily thinking them through in detail; type two is more
reflective, and while in service of getting on with doing things, it can wander beyond
the concrete situation in a more abstract pursuit of solutions – reflective thinking
here is ‘regulated.’ In other words, reflection is not an addition to experience, it is
itself experience. Reflection is both doing and knowing. This argument points to
the intimate connections that exist between method and subject matter; these are
connected in the same way: functionally in the pursuit of practical goals.
But this functional connection within reflective experience still does not fully
provide a way out of the underlying confusion Dewey witnessed in education. While
we can see that within reflective experience method and subject matter are connected,
there must be something in experience which guides this connection. Here Dewey
spoke of aesthetic experience as that mode of experience which reflection emerges
from, to which it is always beholden, and to which it returns; or put in a better way:
aesthetic experience underpins reflective experience.
Before embarking on a further exploration of the connection between reflective
and aesthetic experience, the reader should understand in greater depth the historical
roots to the confusion in education, and Dewey’s perspective on this. Such a historical
understanding signals the need for better comprehending the connection between
reflective and aesthetic experience. Central to Dewey’ historical perspective was the
development of institutionalized schooling, which grew from the perceived need to
formalize learning in those specialized and highly valued cultural activities that were
usually outside of the everyday experiences of most community members. Dewey
coined this ‘the medieval conception of learning,’ and it was this conception of
learning that underpinned the development of school as an institution. Yet schools,
so conceived, were not able to service the ideals of a democratic community, Dewey
argued. Even reforms in education such as those around vocations considered to be
more mundane (rather than those believed to be special and only open to the elite)
became entrenched within this medieval conception of learning, with application of

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formalized forms of learning resulting in schools based on the efficient model of the
factory.
The development of schooling in this way was premised on the belief that
knowing is the most important aspect of education, more important than doing. Yet
both Dewey’s understanding of reflective experience and his historical observations
related to learning and schooling have shown us that knowing is indeed a form
of doing, and that it was separated from doing for cultural reasons rooted in class
divisions. But Dewey’s approach to the problem of confusion in education goes deeper
than this – to aesthetic experience, that immediate and direct form of experience
which is holistic in an emotional sense. Aesthetic experience is where we live – it
is the way we are being a person, here and now. Armed with this understanding
we are better placed to take the next step in presenting our argument. This next
step involves addressing Dewey’s notion of education through occupations, which
are both aesthetic and reflective – being, doing and knowing in unity. As Miettinen
(2006) points out, work was, for Dewey, the prototypical activity for understanding
knowledge in reality. Dewey therefore looked to work activity as a foundation for
effective and meaningful education: ,“education through occupations … combines
within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method”
(1916a, p. 361).

NOTES
1
Dewey uses the spellings esthetic and aesthetic. We shall use aesthetic when it is in our own words but
retain Dewey’s spellings in quotes.
2
We have deleted the term ‘race’ from this quote as, following Fallace (2012), we are sensitive to
the difficulty surrounding Dewey’s early use of this term. In its place we have employed the term
‘community’ which we believe more clearly conveys the pluralistic beliefs that came to characterize
his thought.
3
We have replaced the term ‘primitive’ with the term ‘indigenous’ so as to bring this aspect of Dewey’s
language use into a form of expression which more appropriately acknowledges the sophistication of
indigenous cultures, a stance Dewey himself adopted later in his career (Fallace, 2012).

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LOOKING AHEAD: OUTDOOR EDUCATION

AS OCCUPATION

OCCUPATIONS AS PROGRESSIVE ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION

We turn now to the way Dewey sought to positively apply his unified theory about
reflective and aesthetic experience – expressed through work activity or occupations –
in education. As we explained, when schooling is about knowing, the curricular
project problematically becomes carving out and toting up subject matter on one
side, figuring out at what age children are capable of acquiring it, and aligning this
list with appropriate instructional methods on the other side. If the alignment goes
well, students will presumably have “mastered the whole,” as Dewey (1900, p. 50)
said; if not, you might add a little more subject matter, rearrange it, or try different
methods. It is beyond the scope of our book to go deeper into the numerous problems
Dewey had with this form of planning, so we will skip to his solution: organizing
learning as participation in occupations.
We want to stress upfront that Dewey’s framework of reflective experience
(in both trial and error and regulated senses) and aesthetic experience was meant
to be descriptive. In other words, he wrote about these aspects of human existence
from a philosophical standpoint and not as prescriptions for educational practice.
He did not, for instance, believe that schools should emphasize regulative/reflective
experience because aesthetic experience was somehow inferior and unable to
adequately produce learning. And despite proclamations that reflective experience
emerges from and returns to aesthetic experience, he did not mean that this needed to
be facilitated by a teacher or had some kind of preordained order to it that could be
‘programmed into’ a lesson. Aesthetic and reflective experience are basic conditions
of human existence. But, awareness of their relationship as well as their changing
character over historical time was used by Dewey as a foundation for making
prescriptions about how to organize education.
Dewey (1900, p. 78) describes “organization” as “nothing but getting things
into connection with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly and fully.”
Organization in traditional education typically is not easy, flexible, or thorough. It
usually occurs around subject matter: it is the bodies of knowledge, the disciplines
as school subjects, that organize traditional education. If one assumes this logic to
be ‘natural,’ it is easy to see why some have gone to great lengths to define outdoor
education as a subject – it is the lingua franca of schooling and the legitimacy of any
reform often depends on the ability to fit into the traditional mode of organization.
We have already discussed the flaws Dewey saw in this approach.

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Child-centered progressives also have an organizing framework, it is just based

on a different logic. Progressive models of curriculum are achieved by arranging
activities according to their supposed ‘developmental appropriateness.’ It is children’s
enthusiasm for certain activities at various stages of growth that directs organization,
and in this framework outdoor education is viewed as a method for reaching children
at certain points in time. Dewey also rejected this mode of organization because it
paid insufficient attention to the larger social and historical contexts in which schools
evolved and individuals developed. He wrote: “There is no such thing as sheer self
activity possible – because all activity takes place in a medium, in a situation, and
with reference to its conditions” (1902b, pp. 30–31). He would later sharpen this
criticism by writing: “nothing can be more absurd educationally than to make a plea
for a variety of active occupations in school while decrying the need for progressive
organization of information and ideas” (1938, p. 84). Progressive reformers, in other
words, had shirked their responsibility for gradually incorporating children into
the complexities of social life through education, believing instead that children’s
personal activity choices were sufficient to direct organization.
As might be expected by now, Dewey’s view of organization is complex
and expansive. He argues that education consists of more than subject matter
and methods, and includes the “trinity of … subject matter, methods, and
administration” (1916a, p. 193). By administration Dewey means more than setting
policies and managing personnel; he means an underlying logic that determines
the relationship among all aspects of the institution, and mirrors to some extent the
way life is carried on socially. In this view it is not sufficient to see organization
as revolving around subject matter as academic disciplines, or around methods as
different kinds of engaging activities. In Dewey’s view, the “moral trinity of the
school” is:
1. the life of the school as a social institution in itself;
2. methods of learning and of doing work; and
3. the school studies or curriculum. (1909, p. 29)
Thus organization is rooted in something deeper than subject matter and method; in
a non-trivial sense, the organization is the life of the school, and moreover, it must
be based on connections between the school and larger community and social life, or
as Dewey put it, connections that are inherent in the relationship between education
and experience.
Dewey posed many challenging questions to progressive educators, and one of
the most perplexing asks them to consider educational organization. He asks, “What
is the place and meaning of subject matter and of organization within experience?
How does subject-matter function? Is there anything inherent in experience which
tends towards progressive organization of its contents?” (1938, p. 20). What we
believe Dewey is urging here is the need to address a deeper sense of organization,
a directing principle that involves subject matter (what is experienced) and method
(how experiencing occurs) not just in a two-part relationship, but underpinned by a

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deeper merging of these together as one – in the ways life has been lived aesthetically
throughout human history.
To understand organization of experience as Dewey meant it, one must turn to
aesthetic experience – which is where life happens for him. As we’ve stated, the
important distinction between reflective and aesthetic experience lies in the emphasis
on aesthetic experience as emotional in nature. Aesthetic experience is holistic,
rather than concerned with understanding things as component parts (which is what
reflective experience is concerned with). It offers “deep and abiding experience of
the nature of fully harmonized experience” (Dewey, 1926, p. 9) and forms “the basis
of an educational experience which counteracts the disrupting tendencies of the
hard-and-fast specializations, compartmental divisions and rigid segregations which
so confuse and nullify our present life.” But if education is not organized around a
discipline or body of knowledge (subject matter) or an activity (method), then what
does provide such aesthetic unity in experience? For Dewey this living unity can be
found in the concept of occupations, which Higgins (2005, p. 449) argues “opens
onto [Dewey’s] treatment of aesthetics.” Dewey explained his understanding of the
concept as follows:
By occupation is not meant any kind of “busy work” or exercises that may be
given to a child in order to keep him out of mischief or idleness when seated
at his desk. By occupation I mean a mode of activity on the part of the child
which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social
life. (Dewey, 1915, p. 132)
Although Dewey viewed work activity as a prototype for understanding knowing
and being, he uses the term occupation very broadly, beyond its usual meaning
associated with adult jobs. An education through occupations is therefore not
vocational education as we tend to understand it. Yet somehow it is the key to finding
a way out of the educational confusion that we experience.
Both practically and philosophically, the key to the present educational
situation lies in a gradual reconstruction of school materials and methods so as
to utilize various forms of occupation typifying social callings, and to bring out
their intellectual and moral content. (1916a, pp. 368–369)
Gaining a well-informed sense for what Dewey meant by occupation is thus critical
to understanding his position on education. Helping us with such an understanding
are the functional connections he makes across aesthetic experience and the two
types of reflective experience. Occupations thus contain three unified elements.
Firstly, occupations are aesthetic and therefore holistic. Such aesthetic holism
includes what we usually distinguish as self, others and environment, but in an
aesthetic way, as immediately felt – not reflected upon as separate parts. We have
a felt sense of their oneness. Thus they are, in this aesthetic sense – or in the sense
of being – different ways of living as a person in the social world, as, for instance,
one would be a rock-climber, an artist, a doctor, or a sister. Such ways of being, as

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aesthetic wholes, always embrace others and environment (Quay, in press); they
are not individualistic (but they can seem this way when considered reflectively).
Hence being a rock-climber is a socially defined pursuit that involves doing certain
things with others and environment, and knowing others and environment in specific
ways. There is no sense of individualism (understood as separation from others
or environment) in Dewey’s understanding of occupations. “Active occupations,”
wrote Dewey (1916a, p. 232), are “concerned primarily with wholes.” And “wholes
for purposes of education are not … physical affairs. Intellectually the existence
of a whole depends upon concern or interest; it is qualitative, the completeness of
appeal made by a situation” (p. 232). Dewey is here drawing a direct connection
between occupation and interest in this aesthetic way. Interest, for Dewey, did not
simply signify a personal (as opposed to social) preference; interest is not merely
personal, it is always social and environmental as well. In other words, interests, like
occupations, can be understood as aesthetic experience. For teachers, interests are
indicators as to the evolving, aesthetic experience of children; points of departure for
the social activity of teaching.
Secondly, occupations are associated with doing. An occupation “is a continuous
activity having a purpose” (1916a, p. 361). ‘Continuous’ here has both long- and
short-term dimensions, meaning it possesses a history and direction that transcends
any one person’s involvement as well as being of such duration that it takes on a depth
of meaning not possible with many short term affairs. For instance, it is those longer
term occupations in our lives that tend to be the most meaningful: being a brother/
sister, a father/mother, and one’s longer term career callings. In an educational sense,
occupation can, by this measure of activity, of doing, be equated with method.
Thirdly, an occupation has something to say about knowing. An occupation or
“calling is … of necessity an organizing principle for information and ideas; for
knowledge and intellectual growth” (1916a, p. 362). It provides “an axis which runs
through an immense diversity of detail” and thereby prompts “different experiences,
facts, items of information to fall into order with one another” (p. 362). This has
obvious ramifications for education in relation to subject matter. Traditionally,
curriculum specialists have looked to subject matter to organize education. Dewey
turns this prescription on its head and instead states that subject matter is itself
organized by occupations.
In Dewey’s formulation, occupation is the key unit of analysis, spanning and
encompassing both aesthetic and reflective experience. It is aesthetic in its holistic
nature, a holism that also contains Dewey’s notion of interest. In connection with
Dewey’s account of reflective experience we have seen that occupation is, of course,
activity, doing, and thus involving an incidental or trial and error form of reflection.
In addition, an occupation supplies the organizing principle for knowledge, for
subject matter. Education through occupations thereby gives shape and definition
to learning in a way that ‘learning as such’ – meaning the disconnected, abstract,
largely purposeless activity found in schools – does not; even though, historically,
learning must also be understood as an occupation in its own right (an insight most

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teachers in schools fail to comprehend). So an occupation is much more than just

a job or topic of study or a method for teaching; an occupation is a living aesthetic
whole whose purpose and inherent structure organizes both doing (method) and
knowing (subject matter). It thus became one of Dewey’s core organizing principles
for education (see figure 25).

AESTHETIC REFLECTIVE
EXPERIENCE EXPERIENCE
trial and error regulated

experiencing experienced
non-reflective
method subject matter
pre-reflective
& how what
post-reflective
process content

concrete abstract

OCCUPATION OCCUPATION OCCUPATION

as holistic as continuous as organizing
purposeful principle for
activity knowledge
being doing knowing
WHO HOW WHAT

Figure 25. A portrayal of Dewey’s modes of experience – aesthetic and reflective – as

these align with his notion of occupations, thereby highlighting the connection
between experience and education (through occupations).

But if Dewey’s sense of occupation is so powerful, why has it not so far made
the inroads into educational theory and practice?. One reason is because the term
‘occupation’ has caused problems over the years. Dewey (1916a, p. 360) often
used the words “occupation,” “vocation” and “calling” synonymously, yet his
understanding of occupation is in stark contrast to that employed in vocational
education as this was practiced in his day and is still practiced today. Dewey’s (1915,
p. 133) declaration that “occupation … must … be carefully distinguished from work
which educates primarily for a trade” was an extremely difficult sell, going against
the grain of a popular understanding that remains with us in contemporary vocational
education. The issue for Dewey was the problematic interpretation of occupations as
adult jobs which could be trained for specifically, a prevailing tendency that turned
schools into handmaidens to industry. In contrast to this, he saw a “right occupation”
(1916a, p. 360) as an aesthetic whole in which one’s self is meaningfully embedded
amongst others and environment such that all involved can grow and thrive. An

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occupation is thus ‘right’ when it gains significance in the context of the local group
or community – which highlights the difference between the social worlds of most
young people and adult jobs – and it is thus educative as opposed to “mis-educative”
(1938, p. 25).
So, equipped with an aesthetic understanding of occupations, Dewey saw the
educational challenge as one “of utilizing the factors of industry to make school life
more active, more full of immediate meaning, more connected with out-of-school
experience” (1916a, p. 369). We stress again that Dewey was not using ‘industry’
here to reference adult jobs as such. His goal was “not that of making the schools
an adjunct to manufacture and commerce” (p. 369). Rather occupations employed in
education must leverage the interests and industries of the (always social) child, as
well as orient these to increasingly complex and widening forms of mature, social
activity. Just as in adult education, where the occupations in question are relevant
to the adults concerned, so with school education: the occupations developed as the
units of work that organize education should be relevant to the larger social purposes
of the people for whom they are meant to be significant, including children and youth
themselves. Educational occupations thus become “familiar occupations” (1900,
p. 25) because young people have some understanding of them as they constitute
their social lives.
In this way, occupations function as the building blocks of living. Dewey provided
some examples of occupations that were significant for the children of his day:
Outdoor excursions, gardening, cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding,
weaving, painting, drawing, singing, dramatization, story-telling, reading and
writing as active pursuits with social aims (not as mere exercises for acquiring
skill for future use), in addition to countless variety of plays and games,
designate some of the modes of occupation. (Dewey, 1916a, p. 230)
These examples are of occupations (relevant a century ago, but most still relevant
for children today) that organize social life. At face, they might look like mere
activities, or methods, but Dewey cautions that “it is not enough to introduce plays
and games, hand work and manual exercises” (p. 230) as standalone activities or
as gimmicks designed to capture attention. “Everything depends upon the way in
which they [occupations] are employed” (p. 230). “The problem of the educator”
is then “to engage pupils in these activities in such ways that while manual skill
and technical efficiency are gained and immediate satisfaction found in the work,
together with preparation for later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated
to education,” where education means, “to intellectual results and the forming
of socialized disposition” (p. 231). For Dewey, subject matter was therefore a
paramount concern, however subject matter is always only meaningful within an
occupation – this is a true fact of both historical and individual (or “ontogenetic”)
development.
This three pronged understanding of occupation as being, doing, and knowing
highlights the connection between occupations and Dewey’s trinity of the school.

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Not just as subject matter, nor merely as activities, occupations are more than this –
they are organizing of life. As such, they should organize the life of the school:
The great thing to keep in mind … regarding the introduction into the school
of various forms of active occupation, is that through them the entire spirit of
the school is renewed. It has a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the
child’s habitat, where he learns through directed living; instead of being only a
place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible
living to be done in the future. (Dewey, 1900, pp. 31–32)

OCCUPATIONS AND SCHOOLING

Dewey examined schooling from the point of view of occupations, in both a critical
and a constructive sense. From a critical perspective, the main occupation of
schooling is being an academic student, a peculiar occupation that is not significant
for many young people and certainly has few parallels in adult life (except as it
serves adult work: see Beach, 1995). Dewey described the predictable consequences
of this fact:
Enforced quiet and acquiescence prevent pupils from disclosing their true
natures. They enforce artificial uniformity. They put seeming before being.
They place a premium on preserving the outward appearance of attention,
decorum, and obedience. And everyone who is acquainted with schools in
which this system prevailed well knows what thoughts, imaginations, desires,
and sly activities ran their own unchecked course behind this façade. They
were disclosed to the teacher only when some untoward act led to their
detection…. Mechanical uniformity of studies and methods creates a kind
of uniform immobility and this reacts to perpetuate uniformity of studies
and recitations, while behind this enforced uniformity individual tendencies
operate in irregular and more or less forbidden ways. (Dewey, 1938, p. 62)
Here we can see how enforcing the occupation of being an academic student leads to
the development of other occupations designed to subvert it. In fact, research since
Dewey’s time has shown that, when children perceive being a student as meaningless,
they become invested in ‘seeming’ to be knowing persons and ‘sly activities’ become
prevalent, often yielding self-destructive results (see Eckert, 1989; Willis, 1977 for
classic examples). Instead, Dewey wanted schools to provide more authentic and
productive forms of occupation, like that found through participation in community
activities that are meaningful to the young people involved.
Constructively designing schools around the aesthetic character of many
significant occupations, instead of the one general occupation of being an academic
student, opens up new possibilities for subject matter organization, for ‘content’
learned in one occupation can be meaningful in another. For example the subject
matter of science is not only relevant when one is an academic student, or even a

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scientist. In fact much of the importance of the disciplines is gained from the broad
possible application of their bodies of knowledge. This knowledge is applied in a
meaningful way within other occupations, such as that of gardening.
Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of preparing
future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time. It affords an avenue
of approach to knowledge of the place of farming and horticulture have had
… and which they occupy in present social organization. Carried on in an
environment educationally controlled, they are means for making study of
the facts of growth, the chemistry of soil, the role of light, air and moisture,
injurious and helpful animal life, etc. There is nothing in the elementary study
of botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in connection with caring
for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject matter belonging to a peculiar
study called botany, it will then belong to life, and will find, moreover, its
natural correlations with the facts of soil, animal life, and human relations.
(Dewey, 1916a, p. 235)
Dewey’s argument is that knowledge is meaningfully embedded not only in mature
disciplines, which tend to be the focus of specific adult occupations, but in other
occupations relevant to children and young people that can be harnessed in education.
Unlike both traditional and progressive reformers, who set subject matter and method
in opposition, Dewey (writing with his daughter Evelyn) saw them as integrally
related in the developing person’s experience.
The daily experiences of the child, his life from day to day, and the subject
matter of the schoolroom, are parts of the same thing…. To oppose one to the
other is to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing life; it is to set
the moving tendency and the final result of the same process over against each
other; it is to hold that the nature and the destiny of the child war with each
other (Dewey & Dewey, 1915, p. 71).
When a unit of work is understood as an occupation – such as being a gardener – it is
holistic in that the participants consider themselves to be gardeners, or seed growers,
or some other malleable label that captures who they are being in an immediate
aesthetic sense (in which others and environment are embedded). This can also be
reflectively experienced as how they are doing things (method), and what they are
knowing (subject matter). So aesthetically, being a gardener is the holistic way in
which this occupation is lived; while reflectively, it is an identity that involves a
particular arrangement of action and knowledge, method and subject matter. Thus
‘occupation’ is a preferable descriptor of an educational unit over topic, which tends
to emphasize subject matter and omit the identity-conferring aspect of participation
in social activity.
Importantly, we emphasize again that being a gardener understood in this
aesthetic way is not meant as an individualistic pursuit – as if the educational unit
is designed to cater to individuals. With reference to the perceived division between

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social and individual perspectives, Dewey describes “an occupation” as “the only
thing which balances the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service”
(1916a, p. 360). In fact for Dewey an occupation is “any form of continuous activity
which renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of the
accomplishment of results” (p. 373). In this sense an occupation is a “form of social
life” (p. 115). Occupations are always socially defined, even if individually salient;
they cannot be understood outside of their social meaning.
Dewey (1916a, p. 373) summarizes his conception of occupation when he states,
“education through occupations … combines within itself more of the factors
conducive to learning than any other method” (p. 361). Like agricultural activities
at the turn of the 20th century, around which traditional life revolved, an occupation
subordinates learning to the pursuit of meaningful goals that are valued by the
community and relevant to the individual. The concept “calls instincts and habits
into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has an end in view; results are to be
accomplished,” for an occupation “appeals to thought; it demands that an idea of an
end be steadily maintained, so that activity cannot be either routine or capricious”
(p. 361). One need only think of the often profound learning that goes on in adult
workplaces to realize how occupations inherently involve doing with purpose
(which can be understood as method) as well as knowing (which draws on subject
matter). Hence Dewey argues that “the only alternative to a reactionary return to
the educational traditions of the past lies in working out the intellectual possibilities
resident in various arts, crafts, and occupations, and reorganizing the curriculum
accordingly” (1933, p. 217, emphasis added). Occupation, as here described, would
eradicate method and subject matter dichotomies, finally rising to the challenge of
providing a worthwhile education on a mass scale.

THE FUTURE OF (OUTDOOR) EDUCATION

The challenge Dewey poses for outdoor educators – really for all educators – is
to see beyond the confusion between method and subject matter. The task is to
imagine an education organized around occupations: socially meaningful units of
cooperative work in which method and subject matter are inherently integrated and
arranged carefully by teachers to “parallel … some form of work carried on in social
life” (Dewey, 1915, p. 132) as well as gain a reflective (scientific) understanding
of the meaning of that work to self and society. If we take a closer look at schools,
the official and primary occupation seems to be that of the academic student. What
this means specifically will be different for each school subject set in a specific
community, but there is a large degree of uniformity across institutions and subjects;
being a math student is much like being a science student, which is much like being a
language student, and so on (see Popkewitz, 2007; Säljö & Wyndhamm, 1993). In all
cases, despite differences in subject matter, the goal is learning content for purposes
of assessment, the chief identity available is that of student, and the work primarily
involves producing things that eventually end up in a wastebasket.1

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Doing and knowing in school, from a young person’s perspective, are usually
undertaken for the purpose of passing examinations; thus the nagging and age-old
questions: ‘When will I need to know this? Will this be on the test?’ Adults like
to argue that this academic doing and knowing is important to attaining a college
degree or landing a job. This is true but only somewhat superficially. In reality,
participating in the occupation of being a student is often directed towards a future
that young people have difficulty understanding as a real part of their lives currently,
or that progressively integrates them in meaningful ways into the social fabric of
the broader community. So while acknowledging “that the future has to be taken
into account at every stage of the educational process,” Dewey (1938, p. 47) was
also keenly aware that “this idea is easily misunderstood and is badly distorted in
traditional education.”
Its assumption is, that by acquiring certain skills and by learning certain subjects
which would be needed later (perhaps in college or perhaps in adult life) pupils
are as a matter of course made ready for the needs and circumstances of the
future. (Dewey, 1938, p. 47)
Hence Dewey (1938, p. 47) derided “‘preparation’” in these terms as “a treacherous
idea.” This applies to vocational education as well, which, although perhaps clearer
in its pathways to adult life, is still beholden to the notion of teaching skills and
knowledge that gain their significance in an occupation existing in a presumed
future which is not a part of the life of the young people involved. Dewey (1893,
p. 660) revealed that if personally “asked to name the most needed of all reforms
in the spirit of education,” he “should say: ‘Cease conceiving of education as mere
preparation for later life, and make of it the full meaning of the present life.’” So
educating through occupations does not mean teaching adult occupations as in much
of vocational education. But then what exactly does it mean?
Key to understanding Dewey’s sense of an education through occupations is that
our lives are constituted by occupations. As we grow we take on new occupations,
and these, as well as the occupations we have undertaken in the past, are who we are.
Growing isn’t a matter of learning about occupations that we may assume sometime
in the future as adults; it isn’t about acquiring knowledge we might apply down
the track in an adult job. Instead, growing is about taking on occupations that –
although historically formed – are significant to us at every phase of the life-course.
In this way occupations can be understood as the evolving, building blocks of
living. We grow into and through occupations throughout our lives. It is through the
occupation we are living at any moment in time that we comprehend the people and
environment around us – what they mean. In this way our occupations also enable us
to understand other’s perspectives, to see things in different ways. And they are the
ways in which others understand us. For occupations are ways of being a person that
sit within us, as who we are.
Additionally, our occupations orient our comprehension of future possibilities –
opportunities and possibilities emerge from within current occupations. And these

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opportunities and possibilities offer potentially new occupations, new ways of

being a person. We see chances for who we can be. So in this way we are always
growing through occupations. We don’t suddenly leap into occupations that have no
connection with who we are.
Think of what it was like when you were entering your teenage years. This is not
necessarily an easy task, but it is made easier when you are dealing directly with
young people of this age and all they are going through. They are not the same as
you are now; neither are younger children. One major way in which we differ is in
relation to our interests. These shift and change as we grow – but as such, we grow
through them, by way of them. Dewey understood that talking about interests in this
way is the same as talking about occupations when these are understood aesthetically.
We are talking about how we make meaning, why things are significant to us.
Importantly, such significance is never individualistic, as if an interest/occupation
is something I decide upon in isolation of all other human beings. The significance of
an occupation is social; occupations are always social callings. Even being a hermit
on a mountaintop is a socially defined occupation. If it wasn’t, no one else would
have any conception of what a hermit does and knows. So the occupations that are
significant to us at different times in our lives shift and change because of the social
(and environmental) milieu in which we live. Who we are can never be separated
from social and environmental context.
Dewey saw the organization of the school achieved via occupations (understood
as units of work or projects), but not necessarily having generic forms across all
schools. Thus he pointed out that “the types of activity remaining as true educative
interests vary indefinitely with age, with individual native endowments, with prior
experience, with social opportunities. It is out of the question to try to catalogue
them” (1913, p. 67). But it is the teacher’s responsibility to interpret and extend
these interests into social occupations of significance. It is this idea that separated
Dewey from progressives. “Interests in reality are but attitudes toward possible
experiences,” he wrote; “they are not achievements; their worth is in the leverage
they afford, not in the accomplishment they represent” (1902b, p. 15). Such leverage
is in the direction of doing and knowing – undertaking certain activities and learning
relevant ideas. Interest as aesthetic experience is leveraged into the expenditure of
effort as reflective experience. Occupations work across this important connection.
The problem and the opportunity with the young is selection of orderly and
continuous modes of occupation, which, while they lead up to and prepare for
the indispensable activities of adult life, have their own sufficient justification
in their present reflex influence upon the formation of habits of thought.
(Dewey, 1933, p. 51)
Interest, when understood in its alignment with occupation, is aesthetic experience.
Interest, as occupation, signals a way of being a person. But as most teachers (and
parents) are very aware, we cannot simply impose a way of being on to young
people and hope for resistance free compliance. Experience with trying to impose

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the occupation of being an academic student on to young people is an example

of such a situation – one which requires an intricate classroom management and
disciplinary structure to be able to enforce. In contrast, Dewey did not advocate
for imposing occupations, but rather discovering them. He (1933, p. 52) believed
that teachers would need to grapple with the problem of “discovering the valuable
occupations,” those occupations valued by a class group of young people (and also
by their teacher, for different reasons). So this task of discovery is premised on the
teacher’s knowledge of the young people he or she is teaching. This is discovery of
an occupation that leverages their interests.
Such discovery has been central to the progressive reforms that mark the historical
development of education occurring out-of-doors. Nature study, school gardens,
agricultural education and then school camping, blossoming into the many and
various forms of outdoor education that Clifford Knapp describes such as conservation
education, environmental education, adventure education and place-based education –
all represent efforts made by teachers to discover occupations/interests held dear by
the young people in their charge. And while each of these educational endeavors
signals a move out-of-doors – a step through the doorway that marks the physical and
metaphorical boundary of indoor education, of being an academic student – each is
also a different occupation relevant in its historical context.
In this way Dewey’s understanding of occupation illuminates, now with much
more clarity, those definitions of outdoor education proffered by the Donaldsons
and carried forward by others such as Ford that emphasize education in, about and
for the outdoors. As mentioned previously, in the outdoors points to method, about
the outdoors highlights subject matter, but now it can be seen that for the outdoors
suggests an occupation when this is understood in terms of interest. Aesthetically,
for intimates the holistic, immediate and direct connection we have with a way of
being a person. Ford’s comment below, while revealing the tension between method
and subject matter in outdoor education, also illuminates aspects of the many
occupations that have become part and parcel of outdoor education.

To many people in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia, outdoor
education is synonymous with education for outdoor pursuits or recreational
skills. Snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, winter survival skills, backpacking,
fishing, hunting, and related outdoor pursuits that are physical in nature
(i.e. nonmechanized) and rely on the natural environment for implementation
are the sole topics …. On the other hand, as many or more people feel that
outdoor education is outdoor science education and consists only of teaching
about natural resources and their interrelationship. Between the two poles of
this spectrum are many people who seem to compromise on some, albeit weak,
combination of the two issues. There are also those who would not agree with
either point of view, because they feel that outdoor education is not a separate
subject, but rather a process of teaching (any subject) in the outdoors. (Ford,
1981, p. 69)

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 LOOKING AHEAD: OUTDOOR EDUCATION AS OCCUPATION

For the ‘outdoors’ can thus manifest in a myriad of ways, each connecting with an
occupation as interest. It is the work of the teacher to discover the for that can garner
the interest of the young people involved. This can be expressed as the teacher’s
feel for the lives of these young people, a feel for their interests. It points to the
importance of comprehending their social worlds, understanding who they are.
But outdoor education through occupations involves more than just for, as interest.
Education in the outdoors points to doing, to method, to “continuous activity having
a purpose” (Dewey 1916a, p. 361). Education about the outdoors highlights knowing
subject matter, but this always within an occupation that acts as “an organizing
principle for information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth” (p. 362).
So the task of the teacher does not end with discovering an occupation as interest. In
a reflective planning sense the teacher is involved in “arranging” (1933, p. 52) the
occupation. Such arranging includes what we normally think of as teacher’s work:
arranging curriculum and pedagogy, subject matter and method, content and process,
knowing and doing, what and how. This means making decisions regarding in and
about as these connect with for. This tells us that in our reflective arranging, we are
also influencing how the occupation will be experienced aesthetically. When we
change our teaching arrangements, we know this will change the way the experience
feels.
An occupation concerns being a certain type of person, which involves doing
certain tasks, and knowing certain facts/knowledge. It is the teacher’s work to bring
all three aspects together. This does not mean prioritising any one above the others,
but addressing all three.
As such, education in, about and for the ‘outdoors’ are not in conflict with each
other. Rather, each is a necessary aspect of education, as revealed in Dewey’s
identification of two types of reflective experience (doing and knowing) and aesthetic
experience (being). Each is necessary because each is a mode of experience.
Outdoor education programs are thus designed by way of occupations. One key
advantage of outdoor education is that it allows teachers to discover and arrange
occupations beyond the bounds of the many constraints that hamper indoor
education. The many possible occupations that come under the banner of outdoor
education are often embraced by young people as significant to them and their
future; however they can always be improved. As outdoor educators we need to be
more aware of how the programs we design, via the methods and subject matter that
we engage with, can be improved by a Deweyan understanding of education through
occupations – as can all education, without any prefixes attached.
Taking such a view to education more broadly, and not just outdoor education
(prefixed), is revealed in Dewey’s trinity of the school as “(1) the life of the school
as a social institution in itself; (2) methods of learning and of doing work; and (3)
the school studies or curriculum” (1909, p. 29). Occupations connect with life, they
suggest the methods as activities and they structure the meaning of the curriculum.
Yet the official and primary occupation of schooling is being an academic student.
How does the school connect with life if this is the case? By conceiving of education

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as preparation for a future adult existence. But is this a true connection with life? We
believe that Dewey has argued against such an educational situation. So how could
we alternatively organize the life of the school?
This is a question that has engaged educators for more than a century, reflected
in the many attempts at reform that have characterized the educational situation,
resulting in conflict, confusion and compromise. But as yet none of these reforms
has provided a way out, a way forward beyond such tensions. Instead they have
simply complicated the situation further because they remain ensconced in the
method and subject matter debate. Getting to a level deeper was the challenge that
Dewey presented to himself and to us. He gave us a direction to follow: understand
ourselves, our experience, it’s existential and historical dimensions – and then we
shall better understand what education is. We hope we have shed some light on
this path, however we leave you to ponder its further significance and the many
ramifications for the future of outdoor education – and for education in general.

NOTE
1
Contemporary educational scholar Alexander Sidorkin (2010) has argued that schools are involved in
what he calls “the wastebasket economy,” where children are essentially conscripted into producing
marks on pieces of paper with no value to anyone. There, “learning is a byproduct of making useless
things,” he provocatively argues.

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Woodhouse, J.L., & Knapp, C.E. (2000). Place-based curriculum and instruction: Outdoor and
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 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

John Quay BEd, GradDipEdAdmin, PGradDipEdStudies (Student Wellbeing),

MEd, PhD
Senior Lecturer
Graduate School of Education
The University of Melbourne

John spent numerous years working as an outdoor education teacher with students in
secondary schools. These experiences led him to question where outdoor education
had come from and its place within education more generally. Seeking answers to
these questions resulted in making the transition to an academic career and a keen
interest in the work of John Dewey.

Jayson Seaman, BS (English Teaching), MS (Outdoor Education), PhD

(Experiential Education)
Associate Professor, Department of Kinesiology
Affiliate Faculty, Department of Education
University of New Hampshire

Jayson began his career as a youth professional at 17, when he was a summer
camp counsellor. He subsequently served various roles in public schooling, from
a classroom English teacher to a district-wide experiential program coordinator to
a State and federal grants manager, working in the K-12 Learn and Serve program
during the Clinton era. He is continuously struck by how acutely John Dewey
understood deep and persistent educational problems, and remains committed to
supporting initiatives in and out of school that approximate Dewey’s innovative
solutions.

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